Rex |

Since last night, I’ve been desperately trying to fix some issues with the layout of this blog without any success. Now I realize the problem is with my internet service provider.

I’ve been trying to fix the wrongly-displaying captions of the MistyLook theme by implementing corrections provided in the support forum. When I update the CSS code in the Wordpress Theme Editor, it show that it has been modified, but when I view the blog itself, nothing seems to change!

Thus I kept looking for more CSS tweaks but NOTHING worked. I checked the CSS using the Web Developer Toolbar and found that the CSS in the browser was DIFFERENT from that in the Wordpress Theme Editor. Something’s fishy, here.

Thinking it might be the browser, I cleared the browser cache – both in Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer. Still, the changes in the CSS were NOT being reflected, no matter how hard you press the clear cache button.

Then a suspicion led me to check my blog through a proxy server. This would simulate viewing my blog from another country. There! The captions were looking just as they should.

BEFORE

AFTER

WHY is this happening?

A little research told me that aside from browser caching, internet service providers also cache webpages. Unfortunately, while we have control over our browsers, we are not able to clear our ISP’s cache.

Both ISPs and browsers do caching to save on bandwidth and make pages load faster. This is generally deemed as useful, BUT some ISPs are said to cache webpages for long periods, sometimes longer than 24 hours! This is a problem if visitors to your site are expecting updates only to be disappointed that nothing has changed even if the webmaster did update.

It’s been a few hours and my ISP hasn’t updated its cache yet. So, don’t expect to see this blog’s captions correctly if you’re also with the Philippine ISP called Globelines.

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