Hi, Bra Theorists… we’re here to talk about a bug in the website. It’s a little embarrassing — we’re a fashion tech company! But it happens to the best of us, especially if we get too clever with our hacky solutions.
If you’re an early follower of Bra Theory (pre 2018), you might be having difficulty accessing the website. I’ll explain why in this post, as well as what to do to fix the bug.
THE WEBSITE BUG
If you go to www.bratheory.com, this is what you see:
When you click “Join the Waitlist,” it brings you to an inactive Google waitlist form.
Clicking the hyperlink brings you back to the main page, closing a poorly designed circular loop.
THE BACKGROUND OF THE BUG
Why is this happening?
In lay-woman’s terms
We thought it would be clever to tell your web browser to remember our website if there haven’t been any changes since the last time you visited.
That way, we could speed up loading time for you!
It didn’t turn out quite the way we planned. We migrated to WordPress last year, which means your browser remembers the wrong website.
To get more technical…
Our landing page was built using static HTML pages. Our developer added service worker caching to speed up the loading time of the page.
Previously, the caching worked smoothly because when we updated the website, Webpack would cache-bust the service worker so that everyone would see the updated version.
In 2018, we migrated to WordPress. Now, anyone with an old service worker cache continues to see what’s in the cache. It’s surprising that it doesn’t expire.
Lesson learned: don’t try to be too clever with your website development, especially with experimental technology like service worker caching!
THE FIX FOR THE BUG
- Open the the dev console (right click -> inspect)
- Hit the Application tab at the top menu
- In the left menu, under Cache, Cache Storage, there’s a thing called “sw-precahe-v3…”
- Go in there and delete the listings
CONCLUSION
Well, there you have it… our website bug. To our earliest, staunchest supporters… thank you for your graciousness, and patience. Please bust your cache, and let others know how to bust the cache as well.
