Hi Everyone,
Just thought I’d post some details of an interesting little quirk I’ve
found
with page caching.
For a site I’ve just built for a small music festival, there are a
number of
artist profiles. I’m storing the artists in my database, but using
caches_page to speed things up when displaying the details to the
public.
I’ve also made it so that instead of the numerical ID appearing in the
URL, it
uses the artist’s name instead. So if someone called “Bob S.” was
playing, the URL would be: /artists/Bob+Smith
Now, with the page caching, it works fine for most of the artists, since
Bob
Smith’s cached page gets stored in myapp/public/artists/Bob+Smith.html
But what if “B. Smith” was playing - you’d expect it to generate
“B.+Smith.html”, but it doesn’t, just a file called “B.+Smith” with no
“.html”
on the end of it. It seems the caching system does not add a file
extension
to a page name that already has a dot (period) in it.
The end result of this is that Apache (this is on Dreamhost, btw) fails
to
recognise that the cached page is HTML (since it has no extension) and
serves
the raw HTML as text/plain… not pretty!
Furthermore, you won’t notice this on the first page view, since at the
point
it generates the cached page using Rails, I guess it’s serving up the
result
from the Rails controller, rather than the newly generated cached page.
This problem only becomes apparent on the second page view - and only
then
if you do a shift-reload forced refresh from the server to bypass your
local
browser’s cache.
I quickly tried renaming the problematic cache files and putting “.html”
on
the end of their names just to see if that helped, but then we’re back
to
square one - the cache thinks it’s the first time that page has been
viewed,
so a new file without a “.html” gets created (and works first time), and
then
you’re back to the raw HTML being served up as plain text on subsequent
views.
So, the workaround for this is to (assuming all the pages that are being
cached should be served as text/html) make a .htaccess file with the
following line in it, and put it in the same directory as the
problematic
cached files:
ForceType text/html
That solves the problem and serves all the pages (even those without
file
extensions) as text/html - though whether this is a bigger issue (maybe
even
a slight bug) with caches_page, I guess is up for debate.
Anyway, I thought I’d post my easy workaround in case anyone else finds
themselves in the same situation. (Though surely I’m not the first one
to
encounter this?)
Cheers,
~Dave
–
Dave S.
Rent-A-Monkey Website Development