Testing a slight problem concern with posts and dynamic templates in Movable Type 3.16. They don’t seem to be resetting the cache properly. Actually it’s working to some extent, but it does take a while (close to an hour) for some of the pages to update; see below for more information.
There is something odd with cached dynamic pages in Movable Type 3.16, I’m not sure exactly what it is yet. When dynamic pages are created they are supposed to remain in the cache so they don’t need to be created again. But when I view the pages after rebuilding (reposting/updating) a page it seems there is a delay (minutes?) before it rebuilds them. This isn’t a problem (for me) if there is a delay (even if it’s minutes) it’s just hard to see what’s going on with them. For my test it took just over an hour and I don’t know why they finally changed (no pings, comments or attempted spamming in the logs).
WARNING – GEEKY CONTENT FOLLOWS:
I created this post at 6:47 pm and I later modified it (at 8:40 pm and also 8:55 and 9:15) and the changes are not showing up (immediately) on the category or date archives. I even tried changing the timestamp (to 9:18) but it didn’t seem to speed anything up. Eventually they all changed (9:42, 9:47 and 10:07 were when the 9:15 changes propagated through; but that doesn’t mean the other changes propagated around before then).
It didn’t seem to make a difference when I did a new post (I did one 15 minutes ago and it still doesn’t show up on the same date archive pages listed above). Still a delay before those changes propagate around. Last night when I noticed this I did delete the cache and templates_c directories, it didn’t seem to help anything (other than everything rebuilding automatically the next request). This last update is posted around 10:40 pm…
So it’s hard to test when pages rebuild. I’m not sure if it’s with every new post or just with posts relevant to those pages being modified. Anyone know?!?
Another interesting (but unrelated) point with the cached dynamic pages is my pages (used to) say what your search terms were, like “It looks like you came here searching for Veronica Mars” but it wrote it to the cache so even when someone came to the page looking for something else or even by directly clicking it still reported that “fact”. Very interesting. Now all my pages say at the bottom when it was created so if it’s not the current time, I can see how long it’s been cached. This is probably affecting my search results record keeping. But it should still give me a good idea of how people find my site.
Hmm… It just hit me that I do some PHP to make sure non-content related stuff doesn’t go into the search engines (ads, comments and my sidebars) I bet that doesn’t run live anymore (actually if a search engine grabs a page first it’ll look all mucky for everyone else, I’ll probably remove that code). This is not to cheat the search engines, it’s to get them to get the data that this page was published for.
I didn’t ignore it… am I in trouble? ;-)