Cache

Hi Developers!

In many cases we can see a phenomena of getting faulty readings although everything is OK. For example, when American astronauts went to the moon, every time the capsule was going behind the far side of the moon, the controllers in Houston were receiving faulty indications about some readings that were fine just second ago and now they were implausible. So they were calling it the "dirty data". It was happening due to the radio signal being disrupted by the moon which at that time stood between the craft and the Earth.

Well guess what!

There is a similar phenomena in Web Design! It is called the cache. Cache is a handy memory space utilized by the browser that works as a buffer - some of the elements of frequently browsed websites (and in web design it's obvious that the websites are tested, controlled, viewed all the time) are saved to cache to increase the speed of loading the page. The reason is simple - to  enhance the download speed of the potential user's favorite sites. From this perspective cache is a good thing.

It has also one rather unhonest but life-saving property that I will discuss at the end.

The disadvantage of cache is that it could lead to a heart attack! Say you were asked by your boss to fix some issue and you do. You're happy, the page looks great on your machine and then you report to your superior. And then he tells you that it isn't done.

OR

You did some changes, you're sure they works and are done correctly and then suddenly after the refresh nothing is changing!

And why?

That happens because his cache is not refreshed or cleared and the browser uses the elements saved in cache to increase speed, but because of that it doesn't necessarily comply with the latest changes done to the project. The solution is usually to clear the browser cache.

I said that there is also one not necessarily honest but life-saving property of cache. If somebody had asked you to do something and you didn't do it because you have forgotten or whatever, you can always do it quickly and then blame cache! See you soon developers!

Firebug

Hi Developers!

Here is another handy tool that makes web design and development easier. A definite must-have tool.
Firebug is yet another extension for Firefox (originally it was and recently it is available for chrome and standalone which can be used even with the "infancy" Internet Explorer).

What it does is somehow similar to the inspect tool of Web Developer Toolbar.

It allows to select a given element of a web page and inspect on the go the style and html. By doing so you can "update" the styles on the go. I'm not entirely sure but I think that you cannot overwrite the stylesheet nor the html from Firebug console, but at least you can see instantly what inpact would your changes have to the existing web design.

The advantage of Firebug over CSS Inspect of Web Developer Toolbar is that Firebug is sometimes more intuitive and easier to follow. However when these two are combined they form a powerful aliance against bugs in the code. I enjoy using Firebug even for development because of it's real time display of what changes are made.

That's all for today. See you soon!