Complicated website development help/question

[hathat]

So I've been working on this website which is an ongoing choose-your-own-adventure story that I update regularly. There are so many parts to the story now that I need a way for my readers to be able to get back to whichever post or part of the story they've gotten up to but I can't seem to find an answer. I feel like I should be able to have cookies track the last place they read, but I haven't found anything that fits that exact nature. Anyone know about this/have suggestions?

[cbVision]

You should require your users to have an account. You could then store this type of information in a database. When they log in, you'll know who it is, and where they are at.

[daihuws]

So the only piece of information that you need to store is the virtual equivalent of a page number - no need to store any details of things like, for example, equipment that the character possesses or hit points, etc? If that is the case, this should be quite trivial - all you need to do is set a cookie with a unique name, a value of the stage that the character is at, with a *reasonable* expiry date - I'd suggest around a couple of weeks tops. (If somebody hasn't revisited the site after two weeks probably safe to say that they've lost interest.)

Have a read of the documentation on setting cookies with JavaScript on the Mozilla Developer Network: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/...ocument.cookie & https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/...ippets/Cookies - unfortunately the API is quite primitive and doesn't include any methods, but given that what you're trying to do is quite simple - in the scheme of things - this shouldn't be too much of a problem.

If you'd rather do it through a JavaScript library, there are some available. A cursory search of Google turned up these:
http://pablotron.org/software/easy_cookie/
http://code.google.com/p/cookies/
Doubtless others are available. I can't vouch for any of them as I haven't used them.
Hope this helps.

[hathat]

Thank you so much for the help guys! I'm going to look into this stuff now and let you know how it works out.