Records of my tumblings through the intarwebs
I’ve started a section on this blog called “My Code” that features code I’ve written. My first release is doConditionalGet(), a generic PHP function that implements HTTP’s Conditional GET mechanism. This function facilitates making dynamic PHP pages cacheable by HTTP accelerators, browsers, or other caches. Read more about it here.
Suggestions, comments, criticisms are very much welcome!
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The following tutorials taught me how to make PHP pages cacheable. If you do not manually set your PHP page’s HTTP headers, that page is generally uncacheable by browsers, reverse proxies, HTTP accelerators, etc. That might make sense for highly dynamic pages or personal/sensitive information, but there are plenty of situations where PHP generated content can and should be cached.
)There is a typo in Ned Martin’s guide: “Last-Modified” is hyphenated! (Took me forever to figure out why I couldn’t set that header.)
Use the Cacheability Engine and the Live HTTP Headers extension for Firefox to debug as you go. Remember that shift-clicking reload/refresh forces the browser to fetch a fresh copy of the page.
Apologies for the short and sporadic posting. I’m busy hacking Zenphoto for another project. 
P.S. Another plug for my host NearlyFreeSpeech.NET; Squid HTTP acceleration on shared hosting for mere pennies rocks! The availability of Squid made me look into HTTP caching for PHP pages.
