When hosting on neocities and all of a sudden your webpage doesn't reflect the changes you have made within the editor after reloading your index.html, people start to wonder Everything worked like a charme for days and weeks and months and then all of a sudden neocities seems to be broken. It doesn't deliver the updated files when visiting your website on neocities. I had the same issue and even doing a hard reload didn't help. Clearing browser cache only works in the case of a client side problem. In my case, it didn't. For people having the same issue, this can be quite stressful. A lot of people have already wondered, if there is a problem on their side/site. I asked myself as well: "Did I do anything wrong?"
The short answer is: Probably not!
This seems to be a problem several people seem to encounter from time to time. Not all sites are affected by it and searching the web for an answer does not help in the particular case I'm talking about. There are several websites that discuss the issue with neocities not serving the updated files. In some cases it has to do with browser caching and people have luck with clearing their browser cache or doing a hard reload of the page. I will show you how to achieve this:
But I already tried hard refreshing the site and neocities still won't update my site
There is a good chance that this didn't help and there is a server side problem that keeps your updated files from being delivered to your ip adress. I found out about this by using a webservice to check my site for errors. I don't remember which one I used but you can try using the W3C Validator (depending on your geolocation it might get served the same content as you do though) to check your site for errors and enable it to show the source code. Then look at the source code of your page and if the changes you have made within the neocities editor are reflected in the source code shown by the W3C Validator, you know it has to do with the CDN serving you an old version of your website.
This particular case
You can save the website and when reloading the file witin the neocities editor, the changes you have made are shown in the sourcecode (editor view) but when trying to view access your homepage by visiting the regular url in the browser, the changes you just have made aren't visible anymore. You can upload a new file (lets say an image) or create a new html file and these get shown perfectly fine when trying to access these directly but a pre-existing page you have updated won't.
What is the culprit
It has something to do with the cdn (content delivery network) of neocities. Depending on your ip adress, neocities serves your website files from one of its content delivery servers which are located within different countries and on different continents. You can check which cdn server currently serves the files to your location by clicking here Neocities has servers running in Newark, Chicago, Dallas, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Jose, Miami running in the US. European IP's get served from Amsterdam, London, Frankfurt or Paris. In Asia the server locations are Tokyo and Singapore and ip adresses from Oceania are mostly getting served from Sydney in Australia.
So if you are running into problems, try reloading your webpage after getting a new ip adress that is tied to another geo-location (by using a VPN or a service like locabrowser.com or hidemyass.com).
What doesn't help in this case
What might help
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