This seems to have been the week of weird caching issues.  I was working on a Drupal project and learned I had to flush the caches when creating templates.   Of course, that was after a few hours of banging my head against the desk.

Then, I was working on a static website and having trouble reloading the css changes.  The site was located on a client server, not one of my own.  I updated the stylesheets and tested on my local machine.  Everything looked fine.  And then, after uploading to the client server, the changes would not take place.  I would clear the browser cache and reload the page.  Still nothing.  So, I tried several different browsers and even a computer that had never loaded the website.  Still nothing.

I sat there scratching my head as my eyes started to pop out of their sockets.  Another caching issue.  You have to be kidding me.  I knew something was caching the stylesheets.  But what?  With a few Google searches and the proper keywords, I came across Jason Beaird’s website, Jasongraphix.  Jason is the author of Principles of Beautiful Web Design,  a great read.  He has a post on his site called CSS CacheBuster which describes a solution to the issue at hand.

The server is caching the stylesheet.  You need to make the server think the stylesheet is a dynamic page, therefore changing constantly.  This keeps the server from caching the stylesheet.  By adding a query string to the stylesheet, you have successfully tricked the server.

<link href=”stylesheet.css?cachebuster” type=”text/css” />

Problem solved.  Though, you should still try to solve the issue on the server.  In my case, I was unable to access the server and therefore this solution worked beautifully.  There is still a chance that the server will cache this page sooner or later.  The address stays the same.  You could change ?cachebuster to ?cachebuster1, ?cachebuster2… and so on.  But that gets to a pain.  I just added a random number to help eliminate the issue.  My final code looked like the following:

<link href=”stylesheet.css?cachebuster<?php echo rand(0, 100000);?>” type=”text/css” />

If you are unable to modify the server settings, use the method above.  Otherwise, I would suggest checking your server settings and turning off the stylesheet caching.

This is a bit of an old story, by a week, but I found it and the technology blog worthy.  When an 8,8 earthquake hit Chile last week, many were concerned about friends and family members.  One woman, Sheryl Breuker, used Twitter to find her family members.  By posting status messages and focusing on hash tags, she was able to contact locals.  The locals retweeted her information.  Soon she received the following response: “found her! she is OK…. she told me to tell Twinkie to stay cool, she is fine!”

It is amazing what social networking can do.  In Chile, Twitter was in use when phones lines and email were not.  View the full story here.

Also, check out Google’s Person Finder.  It was created to quickly connect individuals with missing friends and family members.  You simply click “I’m looking for someone” or “I have information about someone.”