Daily Dotventures: Freshen Up Your Blog: Making Sure Your Readers See Your Latest Post

When I started this blog back in August putting up posts was a breeze. Grab a topic, do some research, write up the piece then just click on "publish post". That was it. My blog article is up and running for the whole world to see.

However, a few weeks ago I started noticing delays. Upon publishing, it takes quite a while (something like six crazy hours!) for my latest posts to show up. The same issue crops up when I perform some changes on the layout of the blog.

Pardon to those eating their meals in front of the computer, but it seemed that my blog is rather constipated.

Seeking Relief

Now I thought this was just a problem with Blogger and it was reinforced by a recent slew of support request at the Blogger Help Groups. Take this particular case in point - "Latest Post Not Showing Up At First Pages".

The symptoms would be that your latest posts won't appear at your blog's front page, however the entry exists at the archives or at the "Dashboard>Posting>Edit Posts" lists. Or, in the case of updating layouts or when adding a new widget or page element, the layout changes appear on the "Template" tab but only your old blog layout shows up when you go to your blog's URL (aka web address).

Furthermore, if you try a simple refresh, deleting your browser cache (read: Temporary Internet Files) or a complete reboot of your pc, the problem would still persist. Then after waiting it out for at least 30 minutes, all of a sudden your changes appear to your relief. Often times however, the updates will not come up for hours.

Languishing in Long Lines

The culprit is not Blogger (although it has its other faults... other many faults) nor is it your browser (though they may have other faults as well). Most likely the problem lies with your ISP.

With the growing demand for broadband, an ISPs primary problem is network congestion. Competition is fierce, broadband costs are going down, bloggers and virtual world populations are going up. These are the signs that bandwidth is taking a beating - the pipes are about to burst and your Internet Service Provider is probably already turning blue from holding it in.

Before this problem of "stale" webpages came up, I often had intermittent disconnections from my ISP. I go online on a wireless broadband network. A few months ago, I often get unplugged from the Web for 2 to 3 days. No use complaining to my ISP as all I get is a recorded message saying that there's "network restoration ongoing".

Then it just passed unnoticed. My connection is a-ok, no disruptions anymore. Business as usual. Only to later succumb to non-updating blogs.

As many join the broadband wave especially households, ISPs scamper to relieve the pressure off their networks. One method apparently being leveraged extensively by ISPs is the use of proxy caches. These are servers that temporarily store the contents of your site so that those seeking your webpages (it works on a per URL basis) along your network can get to your content faster, which in turn frees up bandwidth to be made available for other uses. Unfortunately, the cache may not refresh its stores for an unfavorable amount of time.

Thus the mystery of the unchanging blog sites is solved. However, things remain unresolved. It is sadly a solution that leads to another problem. The question now therefore is, how do we bypass the network cache?

Push, man, push!

There are several ways to clear the cache according to Ron "the Rat" Southern of Most Frequent Blogger Questions (MFBQ). First off, how do you determine if you're behind an ISP proxy cache? Add a question mark to your web address. If you're latest post gets returned, it means you're behind a proxy.

Remember that cache retrieval works on a per URL basis. So if you append a "?" followed by a unique random string (e.g. www.domain.tld/?asdf), the cache will see it as a new URL request on your domain and if there's no match to the string the latest instance of your webpage will show up instead. However, that would be a new webpage stored in the cache for your domain. If you make another update, you would have to supply a new random string. Now that's a very clumsy way of doing things. Effective, yes, but very inconvenient.

Don't despair, there's another way.

Dumping The Load

Now, you might have already performed a browser refresh before but just to again "refresh" us, for Internet Explorer the shortcut is the "F5" button. For Firefox, its "Ctrl-R" (apparently F5 works too... at times anyway). Some say doing refreshes several times in a row works. But to be sure, try a "forced refresh" or "forced reload" instead.

This is done by pressing "Shift" on your keyboard along with the refresh combination. So for IE it's "Shift-F5" or "Shift-Ctrl-F5" (sometimes Ctrl-F5 works by itself). For Firefox, the key combination is "Shift-Ctrl-R". Forced reload effectively sends a command (no-cache or cache-control) along the network to bypass the cached copy and retrieves the webpage directly from the host server.

This knowledge helped me tremendously in seeing how my updated blog shows up on the Web (I hope it works for you too). Unfortunately, not all blog readers know how to do a forced reload. If they're sitting behind a proxy cache (many of them don't even know it) which doesn't refresh properly and sees you're archived blog post instead of your fresh entry, your readership is bound to dip.

Don't Forget To Flush

Only two options are left for "blogists" at this point to make your blog "cache-free". One is to post a conspicous notice for your readers to regularly do a forced reload to get fresh updates to your blog. That's extra work for them but at least they know.

Your Ads Love It Here!

Another one I've come across recently is to use a meta-tag in the headers section of your template. Copy and paste this between the "HEAD" tags on your Blogger template.

<meta equiv="CACHE-CONTROL" content="NO-CACHE">

This in effect would direct cache servers to always have requests directed back to the original web server. Note that these http-equivalent header tags may not always work as not all proxies recognize HTML headers. But since we don't control the Blogger servers (lucky you if you run your own) we can't program the web server to provide http headers to this effect. Any way, I advise you do your own search on the said meta-tag and decide for yourself whether you will implement them on your own blogs.