A website problem

During the last few weeks, audlemOnline has received intermittent reports of the website showing "old news" when accessed early in the morning.

It appears that the Home news page and sometimes the chatbox page as well, can show headlines and stories from the previous day instead of the current day. This problem appears to be cleared for the rest of that day when one of the editors accesses the control panel, but sometimes owing to these individuals' somewhat erratic and dilatory habits, this may not happen until after breakfast.

The technical "powers-that-be" have explained this as due to "cache-ing" problems – apparently in order to make the whole system run more quickly, the computer keeps a copy of news pages ready formatted and created so as not to have to recreate them each time they are accessed by a reader. This is fine so long as the computer remembers to create the cache copy afresh when there are any changes to the story or anything it refers to. This is the process that appears to have developed a glitch.

The team is in the process of trying to get a brand-new version of the website ready for use, much hampered at present by the lockdown preventing the team getting together in one place at one time to finish off the last remaining touches – but meanwhile it would seem to be pointless to spend a lot of time and effort trying to find a problem which is expected to disappear anyway with the new version.

So please bear with us for the moment – just remember that "today" may actually be "yesterday" or possibly "tomorrow" depending on which way you are facing.