overstimulate

One of the large problems with desktop software was keeping the installed base up to date. Even Microsoft has had issues keeping their computers patched. And supposedly this is fixed with web apps. But as the alpha service renkoo observed about lost updates, you still have to be careful.

If you are having problems with Renkoo today, it is likely that you have the old version cached in your browser.

You see, browsers cache linked files such as javascript and CSS stylesheets. This is great because you can have large scripts/stylesheets only downloaded the first time a visiter hits your site. The browser does NOT check with the server if it considers resources to be fresh. This implies the instant you start changing javascript or css in linked resources, you are potientally causing presentional errors, or worse yet, old ajax calls could cause data integrity problems.

Thankfully there is a very simple fix. Always append the version number to the filename of linked resources (perhaps using the version number from your code repository). Since your HTML file links to a new file the new version will be downloaded. It is a simple fix, but easy to forget as you probably hit refresh many times when you are working on your projects, which will download a fresh copy of all linked resources.