Q'PLAAAAAAAAAA I got it working. It finally freaking works. The HTML file cache busting is finally solved. NotSSG 1.1 is now officially actually happening, and NotSSG powered sites (including mine) will never have to worry about stale pages, sheets or scripts ever, ever again! :D
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Cache busting CSS and JS wasn't too complex. But MAN, HTML file cache busting, combined with the fact Neocities has a bug with ?cb=xxx where it does the opposite of expected and often serves stale pages. And wanting to remain compatible with other hosts and the file system. Well, let's just say it's been a learning experience 😂😂😂. The code is written, tested on the file system and XAMPP. Now to test live lol.
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scott2
3 weeks ago
And of course there's Neocities clean URL thing where it redirects about.html to just about being in the mix. Blimey.
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tabf5
3 weeks ago
The mystery of .html cache-busting continues to haunt us all. If we had access to our nginx config files we could all fix this in an hour. If only.....
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Weeell I just uploaded the (not yet released) 1.1 of NotSSG to my own site so I can test it for a bit, 5 minutes before I go to sleep. Seems pretty solid, but let me know if anything explodes! :D NotSSG 1.1 will include HTML cache busting, the ability to put layout.js wherever you want, and I think I added something else, but I've forgotten what it was while typing this (I have it written down somewhere).
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scott2
3 weeks ago
Because of this feature, you'll now see ?cb=xxx in the address bar, and in links when browsing my site. This ensures repeat visitors get the latest version of my site (rather than a cached version), without them having to F5 or Ctrl+F5. It's divided into 15m buckets to be server/bandwidth friendly.
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scott2
3 weeks ago
Right at this moment, 100% of my subscribers say they are happy they subscribed. Sure, my only subscriber right now is me. But I'd still say that's good happy subscriber ratio for day 1.
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scott2
3 weeks ago
Well, I've learned HTML file cache busting IS possible. I thought it wasn't. Now it HAS to go into NotSSG. So this is just me experimenting and getting an idea of how it works.
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Well, I goofed and NotSSG's boilerplate code, which should never change, had to change, and 1.0.1 is available for download. Get the details nyar!: https://scott2.neocities.org/blog/2026-03-03_notssg-1-0-1-oops/
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scott2
1 month ago
Thank you! That's honestly really great to hear! Simplicity was my absolute top priority with this project (both for myself and others who may use it), and a lot of thought went into that aspect of it!
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RSS: The Lighter way to Subscribe to Websites (lol xD). Little article that explains RSS and provides an option for subscribing to websites: https://scott2.neocities.org/rss/
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If anyone's interested, HTML file cache busting using a URL parameter works... provided you use Neocities clean, canonical URL. So ✅ about?cachebust=xxx, but, ❌ about.html?cachebust=xxx often serves stale content. I'll possibly be providing NotSSG's cache busting as a separate, independent non-NotSSG script also for those that might want it, and doing a blog entry on how the cache busting works at some point.
I really really really want to use NotSSG but I don't want to rewrite my current site around it, but I'm trying to think of a new Neocities site I could make as a side project to use it
Thanks tabf5, it's great to hear you're interested in NotSSG! It'll be there if/when you're ready! 😁