After you’ve been at this blogging thing for a while you pick up a few knowledge nuggets that don’t seem that important until someone’s predicament is brought to your attention.

A friend recently called me and must have whined about errors with his Wordpress theme for a good 20 minutes. I offered to take a look but could not make the least bit of sense out of his rantings.

He had made one CSS change after another, without backing up the original I might add, but could not get his theme to adjust accordingly.

The problem?

Well, it all boiled down to… the CACHE.

An Impatient Bloggers Best Friend?

These little blogs aren’t so little after all and to combat this, many of us install plugins like wp-cachee or wp-super-cache to help speed up load times.

This is good practice, as it gets your content up faster so the notoriously impatient blog reader does not have to wait.

I won’t try to explain what the browser cache does, I will let the experts at Mozilla tell you:

However, the browser cache and these caching plugins can create some confusion, frustration and an occasional whiner.

Besides the fact that wp-cache and wp-super-cache are NOT “plug and play” (there’s some .htaccess file tweaking involved), they do such a good job that, unless your smarter than your cache, you might go bonkers as you make changes to your blog via the admin panel or .php files but don’t SEE those changes when you “refresh” the screen.

In some cases, even a “hard refresh” (shift button + refresh or ctrl + f5) doesn’t work. This was what happened to mi amigo and did I say he was really whining about it… oh yes, I did.

So, save yourself hours of frustration and an annoying phone call to an innocent friend.

If your browser and your blog are caching away, you will need to:

1. As mentioned above… Firefox browser: Tools>Clear Private Data…>Check “Cache”>Clear Private Data.

2. Close the Firefox browser and reopen.

(I don’t use Internet Explorer so I have no suggestions… other than to switch to Firefox.)

This way, you are guaranteed to see your changes and can rest assured that your blog is not conspiring against you.

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