In a recent blog post, Brian Moon talks about how he has succeeded to help make a users cookie last a bit longer, so that even if he leaves a site, he has ‘n’ seconds to come back and still be logged in. He provides a method to extend the life of the cookies currently set for the domain by changing the time to live through a series of ini_get calls wrapped in a setcookie() call.

“Consider an application that sets the cookie expiration to 5 minutes. The person clicks around on the site, gets a phone call that lasts 8 minutes and then gets back to using the site. Their session has expired!!!! How annoying is that? The only sites I know that do that are banks. They have good reason. I understand that,” writes Moon.