Page 30 of 33

Prevent users from accidentally leaving the page [JavaScript]

August 18, 2011 /

Sometimes your users might lose important information that they’ve been working on by accidentally leaving the page. They can either press the “previous page” or “next page” button by accident, or they can hit the “backspace” key on their keyboard, inadvertently click a link etc.

Luckily you can prevent them from losing their progress by using the following bit of JavaScript code:

window.onbeforeunload = function() {
    if (your_users_might_lose_their_work) {
        dialog_text = "IMPORTANT: Are you sure you want to leave this page?\n\n";
        dialog_text += "WARNING: If you leave this page, you will lose all your current progress.";
        return dialog_text;
    }
};

This code works perfectly fine with all modern browsers, with one small disclaimer: Firefox will not show your custom warning to your users, instead it will simply state “This page is asking you to confirm that you want to leave – data you have entered may not be saved.” However, that’s exactly what you usually want to say in this situation anyway.

What a lovely Sunday!

August 14, 2011 /

I couldn’t be much happier right now … Everything’s great, we’re making great progress, we’re getting ready to finally launch Spin Rewriter to the general public and I was relaxing at the beach, lazily checking my email inbox on this lovely Sunday when I received yet another brilliant testimonial from one of our Beta Testers:

“I have been testing spinrewriter and its pretty damn good. Still a few tweaks to work out with some phrases that it creates but definitely better than anything I have ever seen.”

We’ve been getting more and more feedback just like this one lately and we couldn’t be happier. Our unique approach is turning out to be exactly what we thought it would be, and we’ll be bringing the Number 1 Rewriting Software to the market very very soon.

Once again, stay tuned! 😀

Love you all! 😀

We’re getting a ton of suggestions – a big Thank You!

August 11, 2011 /

I just wanted to once again publicly thank all of our Beta Testers who are doing incredible work in helping us make a superb product!

We’re constantly getting great feedback and based on this feedback we’ll be soon be adding great little tweaks such as:

– While users are in the Edit Mode (actively working on their articles), they will be warned if they click the “previous page” or “next page” button in their web browser or they want to leave the page without saving their progress. What does this mean? It means that our users will never lose their hard work and all the rewriting progress they’ve done with their articles by accidentally pressing the “backspace” key on their keyboards which takes you to the previous page.

– Users will soon be able to select phrases that span over punctuation marks, e.g. they will be able to select the phrase “the red, white and blue” that they currently cannot and replace it with “the American flag”.

– Users will be able to simply click on the underscore (underline) of already suggested phrases to select them, instead of manually selecting them by dragging their mouse over them.

As you can see, we’re working pretty hard, so – stay tuned! 😀

Get HTML of selection [JavaScript]

July 17, 2011 /

I just recently needed to get the actual HTML of what was selected in a browser. Selected as in “you drag your mouse across some text and it turns blue”. So I came up with this nifty piece of JavaScript code that works quite flawlessly across all major browsers (yes, including IE).

/**
 * gets the current selection, including HTML code
 * @return string
*/
function getSelectionHTML() {
	var userSelection;
	try {
		if (window.getSelection) {
			// W3C ranges
			userSelection = window.getSelection();
			if (userSelection.getRangeAt)
				var range = userSelection.getRangeAt(0);
			else {
				var range = document.createRange();
				range.setStart(userSelection.anchorNode, userSelection.anchorOffset);
				range.setEnd(userSelection.focusNode, userSelection.focusOffset);
			}
			var clonedSelection = range.cloneContents();
			var div = document.createElement("div");
			div.appendChild(clonedSelection);
			return div.innerHTML;
		} else if (document.selection) {
			// Internet Explorer selection
			userSelection = document.selection.createRange();
			return userSelection.htmlText;
		} else {
			return "";
		}
	} catch(e) {
		// an error occurred - supposedly nothing is selected
		return "";
	}
};

Is someone “borrowing” your content?

July 7, 2011 /

Nobody likes it when their very own content ends up on some website that simply “borrowed” it. Luckily there’s a way for you to find everyone who borrows your content. It’s called CopyScape and it’s extremely intuitive, so you’ll most certainly be able to figure out how to use it.