Barbara Feldman: Browser Caching Blooper

Browser Caching Blooper

Can you do me a favor? Can you visit the http://www.Surfnetkids.com home page, and hit "Refresh" or "F5" to reload the page?

Thanks! You now have the most recent copy of our homepage displaying in your browser.

What's the deal? Here's the long story, if you're interested.

One popular way to for webmasters to get their webpages to load faster is to issue instructions to the browser to cache (or save) certain elements of the page locally (on your own computer) so the browser doesn't have to spend extra time going out to the Internet for each and every image, Flash, or script file.

So, being the jack-of-all-trades that I am, I have been making changes to my Apache configuration (server computer) to speed things up. But a few weeks ago I made a blooper of a mistake, that caused some visitors (maybe you?) to not see a new Surfnetkids homepage for 220 days. Simply manually refreshing any of the Surfnetkids pages will get rid of that old caching instruction, and get you the updated page.

Hey, I love to learn new things, and making mistakes is part of learning. As comedian Steven Wright once said, "Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it."


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