Seeing Double

If you visited this site between yesterday afternoon and this afternoon, you may have noticed that the site had a duplicate entry. The brilliant better-half sent me this email and all was clear:

First, when I deleted my browser cache, everything was OK. But before that, I had scoured the database tables and found no records that contained entry ID #846 (the duplicate one that you had deleted).

There’s a field in the mt_blog table named ‘blog_children_modified_on’ that controls the ‘conditional GET’ of the browser. A conditional GET is the way browsers save bandwidth… if they already have a cached up-to-date copy of a file, there’s no need to obtain a new one. [NOTE: mt_blog contains one record for each blog hosted on the Movable Type installation... therefore, we have only one record]

By updating this field to the current time, all cached versions should now be considered obsolete.

There’s also a field in the mt_entry table named ‘entry_modified_on’ which states when an entry has changed. That probably should be updated for the OK entry… that way both the ‘blog children’ field and valid weblog entry’s timestamp indicate that something has changed… which should make all browsers get the most up-to-date copy of the page.

The geekiness just warms the cockles of my heart.

Then, he out did himself by providing me with this link. There’s nothing better than old bawdy songs and inscriptions.