Funky caching for Joornal | Comments (0)
Posted in Muffin Research Labs on 15th May 2005, 9:20 pm by Stuart
I’ve been working out how best to utilise caching within Joornal. The current system that I employ uses a traditional baking method (apt for Muffin Research no?) This means that when I post an entry the script creates the cached version and every comment that is added recreates the cache. This is the same type of caching method Movable Type uses.
This works fine but has an issue when it comes to changes in the template. When the template changes every cached page has to be rebuilt if it is to reflect those changes. Which is not an issue when there’s only a few pages but it’s a pain when there’s hundreds or thousands. The solution I am thinking of using I first came across at Phil Ringnalda’s site. It employs a custom 404 handler that looks to see if the page requested should exist and if so it builds the page from the database and serves the page to the client. The next time the same page is requested a cached version of the page is served.
The main benefits of ¨funky caching¨ are; should you change the templates all you have to do is remove all of the cached files and they will be recreated as required. It’s a neat solution but I have one question: What do the search engines see when they try to look at a page that doesn’t exist?
Provided search engines don’t see the 404 I will most likely implement this solution into Joornal for the release. I am interested to hear any views anyone has re: different methods of caching for web-apps, and whether anyone would like to see more than one type of caching as options in Joornal?
