teemu has technical answers to technical problems

Recently we (and many other bloggers) had some technical problems with the front page not reloading properly.

SuperTeemu has an answer for us:

I figured out the cause of the problem; here's a brief explanation in case someone is interested:

(Summary: Blogger system is to blame, not lukery's fault, users need to occasionally reload while waiting for the problem to go away.)

- Along with every page, web servers send some metadata ("http headers") about page to browser, including "last modified at" and "cached copy is set to expire at" dates. Browsers use this data to determine whether to use local cached copy already in memory, or get a fresh page from web server.

- Blogger has these dates a bit messed up, occasionally telling browser that page was last modified few minutes in future. That's clearly a violation of web standards.

- Firefox (I don't know about other browsers) goes bonkers due to violation, and decides that the wrongly dated page is valid until year 2020, displaying it again and again unless user explicitly reloads the page.

I notified both Blogger and Firefox teams about the problem, hoping that either of them will fix it soon.

the problem appears to be intermittent somehow, i'm not sure how to explain that, but if this problem comes up again (i.e. you think that i must have been murdered or renditioned or given up blogging in disgust, and I haven't given you advance warning), Teemu suggests:

To force refresh (i.e. bypass cache):

on Internet Explorer:
press CTRL while clicking REFRESH

on Firefox:
press SHIFT while clicking RELOAD

Thanks SuperTeemu