Are You Seeing Our Latest?
We update our Web pages frequently. Our home page is very seldom unchanged for
as long as three days.
Most Web browsers use disk caching to speed up your second access to files you
have seen before. The page is saved on your hard disk or in memory of a machine.
When you request it a second time by selecting a link you have used before, the file
may come from the cache on your disk rather than being downloaded slowly from the Internet.
That helps a lot with slow modem connections and heavy graphics pages.
Ideally the
browser checks to see if the page needs updating before it serves you a stale page.
But not always. In Netscape there is a preference reached through
Options-Network-Caching that lets you set an option for Verify Documents to Once
per Session, Every Time, or Never. If yours is set to never, you are going to see stale
pages frequently when you revisit a site. We recommend you set that option to at
least Once per Session. On our own machines we set it to Every Time. It may slow
reloads, but to us it's worth the few second's wait. In Explorer, there is also a setting
for options that defaults to the equivalent of Never. We recommend setting that one
to Once per Visit. Our pages have very lean grahics, and are designed to load quickly even if you have
a slow connection. One user of Explorer informed us that he had success fooling his cache by "zeroing out" the History
option so that the browser does not keep a history of where he has been more than one day.
In addition to your browser, some organizations or Internet
Service Providers also cache or save Web pages and supply them to the next one of
their subscribers who tries to browse them as a way of saving Internet bandwidth and
making the page load faster. The page is saved on a disk or in memory of a machine
within the organization. This permits many hits to be served from one occasional
download of the page by the organization's server. Sometimes we have updated
pages and had browsers complain that we have not. If your organization has a "proxy
server" or another server that caches files, or if you are with AOL or another ISP
who uses caching, you may well be seeing stale pages. Fast, efficient, but possibly
stale. For some pages we do not update frequently, including this one, it will seldom
matter, but for our home page, calendar and others we update frequently it can make a
big difference. Our pages have the latest update date at the bottom.
On some systems with caching, cached pages can be updated just by hitting your
Reload or Refresh button. For Internet Explorer, you may have to click on the button repeatedly. On others you have to manually delete the disk and memory cache
by selecting that option and a delete button. On others you may have to ask your system administrator
how to update the cache. You can also use our alternate domain address, or add the file
name for the default file. Any of these will get you the same page from the same physical server, but
the slight difference in URL will fool the cache unless someone has used it recently. Our variations:
Google rates special mention. We really like their searching, since they have a simple interface page and are more
often on target than other search engines so we save a lot of time by getting the
right page early in their list. But we seldom use their "Cached/Fast!" option, since it is
actually slower than our page, and can serve up a really old version of the page you want. Google is a great search engine if you don't use that option.
This page was last revised on: December 28, 2003.
|
Arlington County Civic Federation
