Date: 09/25/06 (Web Development)    Keywords: programming, browser

I have this site which clearly needs optimization and I am working on that part. However, there is also an issue whereby the content is updated frequently and my boss is pretty upset about the fact that at times it requires a hard refresh of the browser to see the changes. While most of the internet viewing world understands this, he's worried that the client will grumble about it. And his worries are probably well-founded, if I know this client.

So I got it in my brain that I should consider some sort of tag/script/http programming that will refresh content on its own. Does this exist? What can I do? I have, so far, tagged the site not to cache but, of course, this causes problems with slow loading. On that topic, I had considered a preloader, but am not fond of having to use those and therefore, my images will have to be optimized and I must find a way to use less images. With the brain of a designer and not a developer, I did not employ the correct foresight in this regard. No big deal, there's always time for fixing that so long as the site remains online virtually constantly.

And so, what I want is to remove the no cache tag and find a way to "expire" the site and force the internet to reload fresh data as often as possible. Meta tags seem to be the easiest option, but after some extensive reading, I'm under the impression that they aren't always effective. I also did some reading about writing HTTP header data but I am also unaware of  how this is done.

Basically, if the client looks at the site and then over the course of the coming hours, I update the content, when he looks the next time, I need for him to see the new content on the first try, no refresh needed.

Any ideas?

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/webdev/355636.html