weird issue with The News page

[Zherog]

This is totally weird. When I'm at home, I can see Rich's news update about his book signing just fine. I use Mozilla at home - though I had my wife look on her PC (she uses IE), and she also sees it fine.

When I'm here at work, though, I'm not seeing it. The "top" news story is still Rich's confession about screwing up the book shipping.

I've dumped my cache, I've hit reload, I've hit shift-reload (does that even work in IE?), yet nothing changes.

Anybody have any ideas why I'm not seeing it here at work? I'd wager the problem is on my side - but just in case....

[RawBearNYC]

I'm guessing here, but...

It sounds like the good people at your office are using a web cache. Your browser make a request for a web page. A server in your IT department receives the request and searches to see if the page has been requested recently. If it has, it returns a copy it saved of the page to you. If not, it goes out and gets the page fresh (saving a copy to serve future requests for that page). This is a scheme that is commonly used to decrease traffice over slow connections by not making trips out to the internet for every little thing.

AOL does this all the time too, bugs the crap out of me.

There's usually an easy workaround for this. If a url contains a question mark, then 99% of all the cache's out there will ignore their copy and go get a fresh page (because of what question marks signify in a url). If you place a question mark at the end of the url ( http://www.giantitp.com/? ) you should see the latest version.

Hope that helps.

[Zherog]

That did indeed solve it.

But why did it just show up now? I've never had the problem anywhere else (that I know of, anyway) - this site or any other.

As far as I know, nothing new has been installed.

*shrug* eh - problem's fixed, anyway.

[LadyGlutter]

Thanks, RawBear! That solves some problems I've been having at home. They haven't been with this site, but still, I'm so glad I read this thread.

[Zherog]

alright - so I do the question mark thingy, and it loads right. I leave for a bit, then come back (my bookmark points to the "main" page - http://www.giantitp.com), and it's back to the old news again. If I click on the banner at the top (which takes me to http://www.giantitp.com/index.html) everything works perfectly.

I would have expected the cache to update once I had it loaded once. I guess that's not the case?

[RawBearNYC]

I would have expected the cache to update once I had it loaded once. I guess that's not the case?

I'm not as surprised as you are. What the question mark means is: What follows is additional information that I believe is needed to display the page (this is called the query string). What can follow the question mark can materially change the data that's returned. This is why web cache's are programmed

It's used to make dynamic web based content possible. If a cache was really smart and noted that nothing followed the questionmark, it MIGHT update it's copy with the data, but most of them won't store that data at all, since the data may change based on what should be stored. and we don't want it to be that smart, because if it was, it might ignore the query string and pull from it's cache anyway.

More answers than you wanted?

[RawBearNYC]

Thanks, RawBear! That solves some problems I've been having at home. They haven't been with this site, but still, I'm so glad I read this thread.

Glad to be of service.

[durandal]

woah!
that is really helpful! thanks a bunchum, rawbear!
i bet this will finally allow me to ues school computers to some degree of effectiveness >.<