[cyberSmurf]

I'm seeing the following when browsing the beta site (using Firefox 12 on both Ubuntu and WinXP):

Navigate to the "Notes" page for any episode off of the home page. The large 'banner' with the static image and show description is rendered at the top of the new page just fine. Immediately below that are the search box and QR code box, right justified, with nothing to their left. Below the QR code box, the episode video player appears left justified, with nothing to its right. The remainder of the page looks fine.

I realize that its still early to worry about minor cosmetic issues with the beta but this issue is rather glaring. Don't want to find out that I'm the only Firefox user on the beta and I didn't mention this in time. Any other Firefox users seeing this?

[Robbie Ferguson]

Hey man,
I think you might just be having a cache issue. Since it's under such heavy development, it's often important to drop your cache and refresh. Give it a try & let us know.

Cheers,
Robbie

[cyberSmurf]

Problem gone.

I didn't suspect it was a cache problem initially as it was occurring on 2 separate systems, one of which was rebooted, but whatever it was I'm not seeing it now. This whole Content Delivery Network system is a big black box to me, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that there are multiple caches in the delivery pipeline.

Whatever the internal details of the CDN are, overall its been working great for this user. Both the live shows and the past episodes have been streaming flawlessly for this user. Great job Robbie, thanks.

[Robbie Ferguson]

Let me try to explain...

In the past (V1 & V2), our site was hosted on a single server. Well, three physical servers; one for processing, one for storage and one for databasing.

But one point of failure since all 3 of those servers (operating as one server) are housed at the same facility.

Now (V3), we are (to use really easy terms) mirroring portions of the site across dozens of servers, located at several global points.

So when you connect to our site, you're getting our central server which tells your browser where to go, and then your browser grabs the files (images, css, js) from whichever server is closest to your physical location.

So a viewer in Japan is going to be loading the site from a server in Japan. A person in the USA will get any of a number of USA hosted servers.

Why this affects your cache is simple: when I make a change to the CSS for example (as was the case with what you were seeing), my "real" server is the first to get the update. From there, all the dozens of other servers have to receive that update through a synchronization process. This is usually fairly fast (and I've developed ways to push it along even faster), but it can indeed take a bit of time.

So, if USA server #1 is synced to the latest version of the files, but Server #2 out in Japan is not synced yet, the guy connecting in USA will see a "newer" ... or "Current" version of the site, but the guy in Japan might see it differently.

I've been working on minimizing the impact of this (hence testing.css and the versioning system thereof), but it could, on occasion, result in some users in certain areas seeing old version of the files for a couple hours when I update them.

Makes sense now?

CDN means simply, "Content Distribution Network". We're distributing the content to multiple servers in multiple places. Simple as that.

Enjoy the speed benefit!