Forget Me!

Now that I’ve finished rebuilding the ZibTech Consulting website, I took a bit of time to have fun with jQuery and N2F on the comments for our news entries. In doing so, I came up with an idea to solve a problem I had, as well as maybe solve a problem end-users have on the internet.

The problem I was solving was a common one; Anyone who navigates away from the news entry page (purposefully or not) would have their comment page reset to 1, even if they’d been on page 23. This seems useless and annoying, so I quickly implemented a storage method using PHP’s sessions. Though this did solve the problem, I decided I wanted a way to clear the pages I was tracked as being on if I felt like reading from the beginning again.

It was at this point I realized I could do something that users to all Zibings sites might enjoy. If you visit the site, you will see a “Forget Me!” link on the bottom of every page. The purpose of the “Forget Me!” link is to give user the ability to clear the session information stored about them on the server. This feature is going to find its way onto all Zibings Incorporated sites in the future, but not simply because we’ll have some AJAX comments hither and thither. Instead, the feature will enable end-users of our sites who haven’t signed up to opt out of things such as having their demographic information stored for their visit to the site.

When we build a site that needs a more thorough explanation on the technical specifics of the feature, I’ll take the time to spell everything out (I’d look for this on the upcoming release of ZibNet). Until then, just know that moving forward we’re going to at least commit ourselves to giving users a real option for opting out of certain things on our sites without forcing them to stop using the site. I think we could all use a little bit of that in today’s age of lost privacy, don’t you?

- Andy