Sharing a session between subdomains

http://guestbook.co.za/ is also available at http://www.guestbook.co.za/. We wanted our users to remain logged in if they’re using GuestBook without the ‘www.’ subdomain and then enter it or visit the site from a link.

To do so we needed to share the session between www.guestbook.co.za and guestbook.co.za. This sounds really difficult but thankfully all it takes is prepending the domain name of your cookie with a period (.)

Here’s how to do it in Rails:

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# In your production.rb file
config.action_controller.session = {
  :session_domain => ".your-domain.tld",
  :session_key    => "_yourapp",
  :secret         => "somehugesecretkeythathastobemorethanthirtycharacterslong"
}

Thanks for the original post I got this from!

Upgrade a show/hide toggle to use jQuery/Ajax

A friend of mine – Auke – is building a web application. The user has a secondary level of navigation that she
can show/hide at any time.

The app doesn’t include any javascript yet so clicking ‘Show Navigation’ currently reloads the page.
Auke rightly feels that this is a clunky solution and makes testing difficult. Here’s how to switch it around.

Before

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<% if navigation_should_be_shown? %>
  <div id="navigation">
    <!-- Some links and stuff -->
  </div>

  <a href="/toggle-me-baby">Hide Navigation</a>
<% else %>
  <a href="/toggle-me-baby">Show Navigation</a>
<% end %>

After

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<head>
.....
  <script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script>

  <script type="text/javascript">
    function updateToggleText() {
      if ($("#navigation").is(":visible")) {
        $("#toggle").text("Hide Navigation");
      } else {
        $("#toggle").text("Show Navigation");
      }
    }
    
    $(document).ready(function() {
      $("#toggle").click(function() {
        $.post({url:  "/toggle-me-baby", function(response) {
          if (response == 'toggled!') {
            $("#navigation").toggle();
    
            updateToggleText();
          } else {
            alert("There was a problem toggling the navigation!");
          }
        });
      });
    });
  </script>
  
.......
</head>

<!-- Replacing the code from above -->
<% if navigation_should_be_shown? %>
  <div id="navigation">
    <!-- Some links and stuff -->
  </div>

  <a id="toggle" href="/toggle-me-baby">Hide Navigation</a>
<% else %>
  <div id="navigation" style="display:none">
    <!-- Some links and stuff -->
  </div>

  <a id="toggle" href="/toggle-me-baby">Show Navigation</a>
<% end %>

I haven’t tested this yet but it should do the trick. :)

Gustav