temporary files/caching

"You said you updated my page but it looks the same to me!"

This is one of the thornier issues a web developer deals with but it's quite simple to deal with...

Your browser has a feature called a cache, or temporary files. How this works is when you go to a web page, the browser stores that page and the images/files associated with it on your hard drive as temporary files. Then, when you go to another page on the site that has the same images, instead of downloading them all over again, your browser loads the images it stored on your hard drive. Go back to the page you just came from and it loads instantaneously.

With most Mac browsers (all that I've used) you can completely turn off this feature. With Windows you cannot, however you can set a limit to how much space is used for these files.

As a web developer that uses Macs, I turn off this feature by default as I'm constantly changing pages and don't want to see the last version instead of the one I just altered. On Windows, if you feel your having a caching issue (which is usually prompted by me telling you I've updated a page but you don't see anything different), you should go to your internet options (or browser preferences) and delete your temporary files. Close and restart the browser. I've seen cases where you also need to reboot the machine to effectively clear the cache.

This one bit me hard when I launched this design of the webkewl site. The whole color thing doesn't work when caching is enabled (DOH!).

I found out something was amiss after dinner the day I launched the site and fixed it promptly but was more than a little embarrassed. The trick works by sending the color to another page which sets a cookie which tells the page which code to use to display it and redirects back to the page so it can do so. When a browser is caching it, it loads the same code that was there before because it hasn't looked to see if anything has changed. So... caching has been disabled on these pages.

Caching is a great thing for modem users in particular, but can be something of a headache for web developers as the way that browsers cache pages vary widely. If you think you're having a problem caused by caching with any of your pages and clearing those temporary files doesn't work (or caching is preventing a critical process), please let me know right away so I can look into it.