A long story of logins

The new vquence website, that lets you create vquences yourself, has been out for more than a week now. But we were unhappy to talk about it because the login code was screwed up. It all happened in the last minute: a crash between the beauty of design and the reality of Web browsers. Who won? Well …

Between Julian and I, we had decided to do a cool sliding effect for user login and signup (try it out on the site – it’s hard to explain in words). Very Web 2.0 – very shiny. It all worked well and we quite happily ran the code for a long time.

Then came the time that we wanted to give outside users access and that our more security-conscious people suggested to exchange user passwords over https rather than in plaintext. Fair enough – no worries – quick fix to change the protocol, right? Bah – all wrong – because now you have http and https elements on the same Web page needing to talk to each other. Big sandboxing issue in Firefox – and worse in IE.

Anyway – I leave the details of this problem – and the ultimate solution for it – to somebody better suited to explaining it. I will only say that it has cost us days of pain and suffering and bug #93 will forever be remembered.

But – we fixed it – and now you can happily create video playlists on www.vquence.com and share/socialise them. I have one on my facebook page. 🙂