Caching with static sites - nanoc - caching

I am using nanoc for one of my sites. I am wondering is there a way to do some good caching for the website. because everytime i update the page i need to hard refresh or refresh couple of times to have changes updated on the browser.
What should i do in order to have the page load the current content right after the first refresh ?
thanks

As I see it, this is not a nanoc question but more of a question related to the configuration of either your web server or your browser. Double-check your ETag, Last-Modified and Cache-Control headers. If I recall correctly, Firefox (still) caches aggressively, so that may explain your problem.

Related

CloudFlare permanently caches page even though cookies are set

I had this problem where CloudFlare wouldn't cache any of my pages because all of my pages returned session cookies. I've fixed this with a own written method, which removes unnecessary cookies from my response header. It's based on the same idea used and described here https://github.com/HaiFangHui/sessionmonster.
Currenlty i'm having this situation which is driving me bananas and i was hoping someone could help me out a little bit with your expertise about this subject.
I'm having this problem that after i login within my site after CloudFlare had it's chance to cache the page in a previous request... It will do that permanently untill the Edge TTL time expires.
Since the official CloudFlare documentation states it will not cache a page if it contains cookies i was hoping that after a succesfull login attempt it will serve a live/personalized version of the page. But so it seems that is not the case.
Does somebody know if this is normal? Of course i'm interested in knowing a way to circumvent this. I'm wondering how other sites solves this problem. My assumption would be i wouldn't be the first one having this issue.
Any advice regarding this subject would be greatly appreciated.
So it seems like supplying a "Bypass cache" setting is the solution.
It's only available on a paid plan.
More info: https://blog.cloudflare.com/caching-anonymous-page-views/

at which extensions caches the browser a page

We have a web application.
Until now we had no real cache handling strategy.
When we had a new version of certain JavaScript files, we instructed our users to clear their browser cache.
Now we want to change this.
Up to this date our starting page was "start_app.html".
In our effort to implement our cache busting strategy we want to ensure that the browser will NOT cache our starting page.
We will change the extension from ".html" into ".php".
It seems that the browser has an array of extensions, when he ALWAYS fetches a fresh copy from the web server, like "php", "asp", and so on.
Is this true and which extensions are these?
Thanks alot in advance
Please don't rely on incorrect browser behavior to not cache your page. Instead, use this header:
Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store
This page has all the details as to why that header will do what you want.

Google Page Speed Recommendation for Leveraging Browser Caching

Well, I'm trying to optimize my application and currently using page speed for this. One of the strongest recommendations was that I needed to leverage browser caching. The report sent me to this page:
http://code.google.com/intl/pt-BR/speed/page-speed/docs/caching.html#LeverageBrowserCaching
In this page there is this quote:
If the Last-Modified date is
sufficiently far enough in the past,
chances are the browser won't refetch
it.
My point is: it doesn't matter the value I set to the Last-Modified header (I tried 10 years past), when I access and reload my application (always clearing the browser recent history) I get status 200 for the first access, and 304 for the reaming ones.
Is there any way I can get the behavior described in the google documentation? I mean, the browser don't try to fetch the static resources from my site?
You might have better success using the Expires header (also listed on that Google doc link).
Also keep in mind that all of these caching-related headers are hints or suggestions for browsers to follow. Different browsers can behave differently.
The method of testing is a good example. In you case you mentioned getting status 304 for remaining requests, but are you getting those by doing a manual browser refresh? Browsers will usually do a request in that case.

How do different browsers handle caching for static content without an Expires Header?

After running the YSlow plugin on a site, I saw that one of the recommendations was to add far future expires headers to the scripts, stylesheets, and images.
I asked a different question about how to set this up in IIS, but I am actually just curious about how each browser behaves.
I have read that IE will cache items per browsing session, so once you reopen the site after closing the browser, it will need to reload all of the content. I believe that Firefox will go ahead and set a expiration date on its own. I have also heard that IE does not cache at all when connecting over HTTPS. I am not sure if these are at all accurate, though, and was wondering if someone could clear up any misconceptions I may have. Thanks!
You are right about Firefox setting its own expiration date. See the second item in this blog post:
http://blog.httpwatch.com/2008/10/15/two-important-differences-between-firefox-and-ie-caching/
IE, like Firefox, can cache HTTPS based content. However, you need to set Cache-Control: public for persistent caching across browser sessions in Firefox. See Tip #3 in this blog post:
http://blog.httpwatch.com/2009/01/15/https-performance-tuning/

Clear all website cache?

Is it possible to clear all site cache? I would like to do this when the user logs out or the session expires instead of instructing the browser not to cache on each request.
As far as I know, there is no way to instruct the browser to clear all the pages it has cached for your site. The only control that you, as a website author, have over caching of a page occurs when the browser tries to access that page. You can specify that cached versions of your pages should expire at a certain time using the Expires header, but even then the browser won't actually clear the page from its cache at that time.
i certainly hope not - that would give the web site destructive powers over the client machine!
If security is your main concern here, why not use HTTPS? Browsers don't cache content received via HTTPS (or cache it only in memory).
One tricky way to mimic this would be to include the session-id as a parameter when referencing any static piece of content on the site. When the user establishes the session, the browser will recognize all the pieces of content as new due to the inclusion of this parameter. For the duration of the session the browser will used the static content in its cache. After the user logs out and logs back in again, the session-id parameter for the static contents will be different, so the browser will recognize this is as completely new content and will download everything again.
That being said... this is a hack and I wouldn't recommend pursuing it.. For what reason do you want the user's cache to be cleared after their session expires? There's probably a better solution that can fit your situation as opposed to what you are currently asking for.
If you are talking about asp.net cache objects, you can use this:
For Each elem As DictionaryEntry In Cache
Cache.Remove(elem.Key)
Next
to remove items from the cache, but that may not be the full-extent of what you are trying to accomplish.

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