Web Baby Shower Help: Session Time Outs

In order to ensure the privacy, integrity and security of each Web Baby Shower, a session is started when you first visit your Web Baby Shower and it times out after 15-20 minutes of inactivity (depending on which web browser you are using) to prevent abuse of idle sessions. The caveat is that if you are creating a long Guest Book or journal entry, or need to get up to answer the phone or console a crying baby, your session may expire and your data will be lost if you try to submit it after the session expires.

Because I do not want to undermine the security of the timed session, I have created the following guidelines for submitting information to your Web Baby Shower. These guidelines apply to both the "front end" of your Web Baby Shower (Guest Book, Birthday Bets, etc) and your Host Control Panel.


  • Have your form data ready to be submitted within 10 minutes of logging into your Web Baby Shower
  • Make sure that JavaScript is enabled in your web browser
  • DO NOT compose your content online -- either at Web Baby Shower or anywhere else for that matter. For your own sanity, I highly recommend composing in a text editor or word processor and saving your work on your computer's hard drive as you work. The World Wide Web is a "stateless environment" which means, in short, that the entire World Wide Web is intentionally designed to lose your data. If you usually get interruped by phone calls, children, or life in general, please do your work on computer's hard drive where you can more reliably save and recover data. When you are ready to publish your content, copy and paste your work into the appropriate form (Guest Book, Journal, Photo Descriptions, etc). This will also protect you from your Internet connection going down and about 1,000,000 other things that can go wrong with composing content on a Web form.
  • If you must compose your work online, you will receive an Alert Box reminder after 10 minutes to submit your form (here at Web Baby Shower, anyway). If you have been at your computer when you see the reminder, finish up and submit your work.
  • If you have been away from your computer and you see the Alert Box warning OR if you get the alert a second or subsequent time, do the following:
    1. Click OK in the warning box
    2. DO NOT SUBMIT THE FORM! (yet)
    3. COPY AND PASTE all important content (the stuff that would be hard to do over again) from the form into a text editor or word processing document
    4. Save the document to your computer's hard drive BEFORE you do anything else.
    5. Return to your Web Baby Shower home page to renew your session:
      • If you are on a page in your Web Baby Shower, click the "Home" link.
      • If you are in the Host Control Panel, click "Your Web Baby Shower" at the top of the page.
    6. Log back onto the appropriate page (it will be necessary to log back into your Host Control Panel)
    7. Copy and paste the content that you saved to your hard drive back into the form.
    8. MAKE SURE YOU SUBMIT IT WITHIN 10 MINUTES! (You don't really want to go through all of this again, do you?)
  • If you have disabled JavaScript in your browser, and you leave your computer or otherwise do not submit your form within 10 minutes and your lose your form data, well, I tried to warn you. It will get lost and there won't be anything we can do about it. Please don't let that happen.

For more information about sessions, cookies, privacy and computer security, please see the following Web Baby Shower Help pages:





Updated September 1, 2008






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