I recently got the keys to the website for my church and I had a bright idea this morning after a study guide was given out. I could post a new entry each day for the 100 days it covers to the blog on the website, providing visitors with current information and gently ensuring that older items get squeezed further back. The site runs on WordPress, so writing some posts was easy. The trouble was that I posted the first one and I could see it on the browser I’d done the update on but my pastor couldn’t see it on her computer. It turned out I also couldn’t see it on my machine when using a different browser!

After some investigation to try and work out if only certain categories or authors were displayed on the live site for regular visitors, I discovered that wherever the site is hosted insists on caching material. On a busy site, it can make things more responsive because it builds an updated page for the first visitor and sends a static copy of that to the next few thousand people to come along. For a busy site, that could be a boon but I don’t think it is a real benefit for a small site like ours. Also, it doesn’t automatically rebuild when new content is posted creating a gap between what authors and everyone sees.

I spotted a cache purging button (now pressed, and that seems to have cleared the problem) and some cache time limits, which I have reduced. New material should now be available in an hour or less rather than about three days! I’ll see how it does with the post scheduled for tomorrow morning and consider where I could reduce the time further or discover an “update cache” button. Still, problem solved for now.