Adding Items
Adding an item is simple and fast (and non-committal, it's just a list, not a shopping cart). Go ahead - add this First U.S. Visit DVD below by clicking on "Add to Your List" button. No really, go ahead - you can delete it easily later if you're not entirely happy.

The First U.S. Visit by The Beatles Our Price: $20.48

Longevity and Uses
Items on Your List are set up to stay there for 90 days, unless you remove them on the Manage List page (or delete your cookies) - or if you add or update anything, the 90 day limit is reset. You can use it as a reference page, a quick look at a previous browsing/shopping session, or as an easy resource for gathering and creating Amazon.com HTML links for websites or weblogs.

Cookies
The Your List feature relies heavily on cookies, so users must have cookies enabled to use this. For the sake of clarity: a cookie is a small text file stored on your personal computer (by your browser) that corresponds uniquely to a single website. Small bits of information can be safely stored there to be retrieved by the correlated website at a later time.

Your List "forgets" items when I hit the back Button
Yes, if you add or update an item to Your list and hit the "back" button on your browser, it may appear as if the Your LIst feature has "forgotten" or lost the change you just made. What's happened is that your browser has called the previous page from memory (its cache), and so it looks like it did when you most recently viewed it. To see your correct changes, either refresh the current page, or click any link to navigate through the site. There are hacky ways around this, but they defeat the very useful feature of cached pages (speedy loading of pages you've already seen), so this small problem will be allowed to exist as-is.

Nitty Gritty
The nuts and bolts of Your List is fairly simple (boring technical part to follow if you're uninterested). First of all, yes, cookies must be enabled to use this feature. If you browse with cookies disabled, apologies, there is no current workaround. When you add an item to the Your List feature, you're just adding a three-part value to a cookie: ASIN, 20 characters of the Product Name, and Quantity. This is limiting, due to cookie size restrictions (4k or less), so the entire Your List feature is restricted to 150 unique ASINs (two different cookies), and the maximum quantity is 999 items.

If you're peeking at the cookie for this site, and the formatting looks odd, it's because it's a cookie dictionary, apparently something unique to ASP that allows one cookie to contain multiple name/value pairs. If you're trying to duplicate this as a developer, you should be able simulate a cookie dictionary on other platforms by concatenating values with a series of delimiters and splitting the returned cookie string when retrieving it. (I'm not saying it's super efficient, just that it's handy for this application).

Why use cookies to store this? For the purposes of this site, BeatleNut.com, the goal is to be fast and efficient. Cookies require no database interaction (so fewer potential bottlenecks), and results are very fast. The 4k size limit is restricting, but the gamble here is that 150 items should be enough for users of BeatleNut.com - of course I may end up eating those words some day.

Privacy
As previously stated on the BeatleNut.com About page: Individuals using BeatleNut.com (http://www.beatleNut.com) agree to nothing in particular, except maybe the fact they find this interface useful. Dobbler Multimedia (meaning myself, as a sole proprietership) will not share any information that is incidentally gathered through this website with any other party. What kind of information can be collected? Basically, what pages were viewed, what search terms were entered, repeat visits, etc. This information will be kept private. This includes any information incidentally shared via the use of cookies for the Your List feature.