Hello all! Long time not see for a normal announcement, right? Though this is more of an explanation…

I was browsing survey results and I noticed someone comment that when browsing older strips, the ‘Last Page’ link sometimes drops you off a few strips before the actual latest one–I’m here to explain this!

WordPress is a CPU intensive program, and so to keep from going over my server’s CPU limitations, I had to start caching (a few of you may remember a panic induced craze over this where I feared being kicked off my hosting despite no actual warnings being given out. :D I was a mess. It’s funny now, but then it wasn’t.)

Moving on!

Caching is where the site creates a plain HTML file to be delivered to the user instead of dynamic, php driven webpage. This way, the site only has to process the PHP info once, and deliver the plain html over and over in its place. It’s far less CPU intensive and makes the pages load faster for you the end user. *puts on cool glasses*

Normally, it creates the html file the first time someone visits the page, and then reloads it when someone leaves a comment or recreates it when the cached page ‘expires’ (this can be anywhere from an hour to a week).

But that wasn’t enough–to really get my CPU usage down to where I was comfortable, I had to preload all of the pages into the cache (in other words, I create all the html files to be delivered in advance). I have this set to happen once a week, and while the cached page will reload/recreate itself if someone comments–let’s face it, not many people comment on old strips.

What this means, is that the ‘Last Page’ link will go to whatever page was the latest when the cache file was created. This link won’t be updated until the next full-site cache preload. :)

And there you have it. I know it’s a little bit of an annoyance when you get to what you think should be the ‘Last Page’ but see you still have three or four more comics to go, but the caching is important for everyone to have a quick loading site.

Thanks for understanding!

(And this is also why the main page will say ’2 comments’ when the strip in fact has about 20 or so–the main page only refreshes when I manually update the post there, or a new one is posted. :D)