Blog caching

[lucassmagal]

Hello guys,

I have, finally, deployed my blog. I'm still hacking the theme, but almost everything is fine, except one thing: browser page caching.

How are you dealing with it?

[justinmayer]

Hi Lucas. I haven't had any issue with browser page caching, so there hasn't been anything for me to deal with. Why don't you hop onto IRC via either...

• #pelican on chat.freenode.net
• http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=pelican&uio=d4

... where it will be easier to help you. Thanks!

[onlyhavecans]

Are you referring to, when developing a theme how do deal with the fact that the browser caches artifacts, forcing you to HARD reload every time or not see your changes?

This is the universal developers query and there is many ways of dealing with it. I use a program called coda, which is a web ide that has a debugging browser that never caches. Cheaper solutions include developer plugins for your favorite browser, or debug mode (like in safari) which has a disable caches options

[justinmayer]

No IRC love. Like a jilted paramour, my heart is in tatters. 😞

FWIW, I use Safari in regular, non-debug mode, and all I need to do is a normal page reload to update the cached assets. I serve the files locally via python -m SimpleHTTPServer and http://localhost:8000/ instead of viewing files directly in the browser. (e.g., file:///mysite/index.html)

[sigmavirus24]

I know that feel @justinmayer. I also always test locally before deploying it with the simple server that python has so I don't encounter this either with Firefox.

[onlyhavecans]

Sorry for trying to be helpful!!! sigh ;p
The develop_server.sh script init's both python's simple server and pelican auto-reload in debug mode. I wrote this because those two combined I found perfect for theme development

[lucassmagal]

No, I'm not having problems with browser caching during development, the problem is when the code is deployed... currently I'm using heroku with ruby's Rack TryStatic middleware.

[justinmayer]

Hmm. As the BunnyMan said in his original comment, there's nothing about browser asset caching that's specific to Pelican. Perhaps the Heroku or Rack communities would be better positioned to help.

In any case, this sounds like a Rack config issue. Do you have static asset caching enabled anywhere? Anything like this?

require "rack/contrib/static_cache"
use Rack::StaticCache, [...]

[onlyhavecans]

So you deploy but old content is still being displayed?
I've never had or heard of a problem like that before.

I'm inexperienced with heroku so I can't help, sorry.

[lucassmagal]

@tbunnyman , yes, I can only see the new content with a hard reload =S

@justinmayer , no, I'm not aware of these Rack configurations. Is there anyone using Rack to serve a pelican blog or it's just me?

[onlyhavecans]

I know someone other than yourself has mentioned it but no complaints.

[honzajavorek]

I deployed my Pelican to GitHub pages and this also happened to me. Browser cached my statically served pages and I had to perform hard reload to get the newest document. As I generated some little stuff by cron on daily basis (list of events), it was not very nice, because my visitors had seen expired list of events from yesterday until they hardrefreshed the page (but no normal person does this, really). As there is no way to change the way GitHub serves static pages (e.g. HTTP headers, I think you could adjust them to somehow prevent such behaviour, at least for often-changing pages), I finally decided to move it to Heroku - I turned the list of events into a proper, dynamic Python/Flask Heroku app.

[lucassmagal]

@honzajavorek , that's what I'm trying to do now... I'm changing some Ruby/Rack configurations to see what can solve this kind of problem.

So... what's your Flask app? Can you share this code with me?

[honzajavorek]

@lucassmagal I actually completely rewritten the whole thing into normal dynamic app. So it's not a solution for you. I had a list of events generated by cron into a static page. I turned it into full-featured dynamic Flask app with views, the list of events is generated on request now.

[lucassmagal]

@honzajavorek , it seems a interesting approach, even it's not a solution for me, I'm really curious about it.

[honzajavorek]

@lucassmagal Well, look here for the original app: https://github.com/honzajavorek/zitkino Now I am trying to turn it into proper app. It's not done yet, I develop it in https://github.com/honzajavorek/zitkino/tree/standalone-app.