Hari's Corner

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Minor blogger glitches

Filed under: Software and Technology by Hari
Posted on Sat, Nov 12, 2005 at 21:22 IST (last updated: Wed, Jul 16, 2008 @ 20:32 IST)

Titaniumgeek brought up a minor issue with regard to blogger-powered blogs that I had noticed before, but hadn't paid sufficient attention to earlier. It is about having to "refresh" the browser before the changes appear on the blog.

I guess the reason is simple enough. Unless systems like WordPress or bBlog (which you install on your own server and are live scripts) Blogger doesn't use dynamic server side scripting like PHP or MySQL to generate its page every time you request it. It has to "publish" the blog into HTML once you make the changes. So although the web page is technically updated, your browser doesn't recognize it since the older page has already been cached. With dynamic blogs the server side script when executed automatically loads the blog from the database each time it is requested and so you don't have this problem.

This is a minor issue, but quite annoying in the long run. Hopefully blogger will come up with ways to avoid this problem in future.

13 comment(s)

  1. I have your site on RSS Feed :) so I saw this a little while ago. Based on this and comments by Drew, I have just registered www.lostaddress.org and will be using that (and Wordpress probably) as my new blog.Peer pressure, eh.

    Comment by Ray (visitor) on Sat, Nov 12, 2005 @ 22:01 IST #
  2. WordPress is nice. It's quite a powerful system. However if you want something which might be easier to template, you can also check out bBlog ;) There are plenty of free PHP blogging software out there. Check out also Nucleus.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Sat, Nov 12, 2005 @ 22:04 IST #
  3. Thanks for those, it may be that the new site won't be up as quickly as I thought! Looks like I have some reading to do.......

    Comment by Ray (visitor) on Sat, Nov 12, 2005 @ 22:13 IST #
  4. Just drop me a line when you shift your blog to your own domain so that I can update the link here. ;)

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Sat, Nov 12, 2005 @ 22:17 IST #
  5. I used or still use http://www.simplephpblog.com/ which pretty much has all the same built in functions of any blog available but doesn't require a database, which I think is nice. Just uses flat db text files to store entries, comments, etc. It's really nice if you host your own site and already have a database running many other things and want to limit the load on your server.It's easily hackable, since it's all GPL as well. Makes it really easy to install on systems you have a web presence on without having access to mysql or any other database. Just need PHP and a webserver.

    Comment by drew (visitor) on Sat, Nov 12, 2005 @ 22:22 IST #
  6. That's a new one to me. Thanks for that link, drew. I'll check it out and maybe recommend it in future to somebody who might want a blog and who doesn't have access to the database stuff.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Sat, Nov 12, 2005 @ 22:26 IST #
  7. Look, if I keep getting recommendations like this I'll *never* get around to moving site :)

    Comment by Ray (visitor) on Sat, Nov 12, 2005 @ 22:58 IST #
  8. I would still go with WordPress, Ray, unless you have a very good reason (like not having a database access). Because WP is secure, it's open source and has some cool features like categories which you might find useful. bBlog is slightly less feature rich but worth a look.I noticed that drew's recommendation of http://www.simplephpblog.com/ is a very basic blogging system and doesn't have things like RSS feeds and so on. Of course it's nice for people who don't have database space on their server or other limitations.It's really up to you. But you can't go too wrong with WP.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Sat, Nov 12, 2005 @ 23:04 IST #
  9. simplephpblog has rss capabilities.. ;)

    Comment by drew (visitor) on Sat, Nov 12, 2005 @ 23:22 IST #
  10. Ah, ok. Thanks for pointing that out. My fault. I guess you just didn't put a link in your front page to the RSS feed so I assumed it didn't have that feature.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Sun, Nov 13, 2005 @ 07:25 IST #
  11. Hari, you are going great guns with this technical stuff. I need to be your student for these things and you can be my Guru :-) (I will be updating my blogroll shortly and guess who I will be adding first?) :-)

    Comment by thennavan (visitor) on Sun, Nov 13, 2005 @ 11:21 IST #
  12. Thennavan thanks a lot man! When you come to Chennai, I'd love to meet up with you! :)

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Sun, Nov 13, 2005 @ 13:36 IST #
  13. [...] Based on comments by Hari and Titanium_Geek and Drew (as a comment on one of my posts), I will be moving this blog. I just bought www.lostaddress.org via Brinkster and will be installing WordPress (thanks for the recommendation Hari). [...]

    Comment by Place of Stuff » Blog Archive » This Blog Will Be Moving House (visitor) on Sat, Nov 19, 2005 @ 03:33 IST #

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