Old web site still there

I suspect this isn't really a Xara problem, but because of the way that xara creates all of its bitmaps with names like 1.png, 2.png etc. it has some pretty horrible effects...

I have been editing my website extensively, and uploading it via ftp.

www.pearlcottage.co.uk

(Many thanks to Egg Bramhill who did the Flash "House Layout" section, by the way.)

I've just uploaded it this morning (and have left the HTML in tact straight from Xara because I thought my adding of iframes might have been causing the problems). And now when I look at it on this machine at work - I find that spurious bitmaps are appearing in the wrong place, even old bitmaps which no longer even exist in the Xara file.

It seems to be an issue of caching on my client machine, because when I did a shift load on every page, almost every page loads correctly (although there are still a couple of bitmaps missing) - this didn't work when I deleted the temporary internet files though.

I can't go asking my users to do forced reloads every time I update my site though - what is the correct way to deal with this?

And also, what is the correct way to clear things up fully on a PC that has previously loaded an old version of the site. Even with a forced refresh on every page I still have a couple of missing bitmaps.

BTW: I am using IE 6 because I am at work and that's all we have. It is quite possible that it is a browser problem.

Regards

Lee

A lot depends on the individuals browser settings. If one has it set to check for a new page on every visit then the browser will.

With content like Flash and javascript files most browsers keep them anyway and assuming that the file name hasn't changed the only way to get the newer version is to clear your Temporary Internet Files completely.

Lee,

I see the problem you're having though. If I click on the "How to find us" button it loads the "Features" button into what should be a map persumably.

As Jimi states refreshing when using swf content is a problem because browsers don't refresh the swf from the server but just keep serving it up from the local computer cache and only a "delete all temp internet files" will force a refresh from the server from such files.

I know this isn't your problem at present but what I do a lot because of the above and because I use mainly flash in my sites is the following.

I have the sites main index.htm in the root directory. This has an Enter button which leads to a sub directory, "site_v1" and loads that directories index.htm

Now if I do any major changes to the site, I create a new directory, "site_v2" and load the ammended site into this new directory. Now all I need to do is to alter the text on the root directory index.htm Enter button to point to the folder "site_v2/index.htm" instead of "site_v1/index.htm". That way you can guarentee that the viewer is getting the correct and latest version.

There's only one thing left to do and that's to delete all the files and folders in the folder "site_v1" and put a new index.htm which states that a newer version is available to press a button to return to the root.index.htm and refresh. OR you could place code into the root.htm to ensure it's refreshed each time on loading. There may be a problem if a visitor has bookmarked a page other than any of the index.htm pages. This isn't a problem when I'm using Flash as all my pages load into index.htm.

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Originally Posted by Egg Bramhill

Lee,

I see the problem you're having though. If I click on the "How to find us" button it loads the "Features" button into what should be a map persumably.



Now if I do any major changes to the site, I create a new directory, "site_v2" and load the ammended site into this new directory. Now all I need to do is to alter the text on the root directory index.htm Enter button to point to the folder "site_v2/index.htm" instead of "site_v1/index.htm". That way you can guarentee that the viewer is getting the correct and latest version.

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Thanks Egg.

I am wondering if that "how to find us" page is actually a problem with the upload rather than the caching, because I can't fix it even if I force reload and delete all temp files - and this has fixed pretty much all of the other problems.

It seems that this is a problem that all everyone designing web sites has to deal with. It does seem though that because of the way Xara automatically names its bitmaps, that you are more likely to get ugly odd graphics rather than just old content.

How do websites that have daily news content cope? (I'm sure there's very complex answer).



Lee

Lee what image is supposed to be on the Find us page ?
Should there be a map ?
I think the problem is in the coding. Because it was the first time I saw your site and I see the features button on the Find us page. So it could not have been in my cache.
The problem could be that Xara just names all graphics as a number.png there is no descriptive name of the graphics.
There is no way for you to control the visitors browsers. eventually their cache will update. Just amke sure in your browser that it is correct.
On my web site , I just upload my graphics and new content and make sure that it shows in my browser the way that I want it to look.

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That way you can guarentee that the viewer is getting the correct and latest version.

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If you do take this approach, it's best to add redirects for all the old site_v1 pages to the new site_v2 versions. Otherwise, anyone who's bookmarked a page on your site will come back to a 404 error, and you'll lose search engine power as the engines lose all your old content.

Another slightly less drastic possibility is to keep the '.html' files (for which having static URLs is important), but rename the '.html_files' folder (for whose contents it isn't important at all) on each version. Then you would have to do a search-and-replace on Xtreme's output .html file to replace '.html_files' with the renamed version, eg. '.files_v1'.

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How do websites that have daily news content cope?

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News is generally text written in the HTML, it typically doesn't require changing any images or other elements that get cached longer-term. In any case sites with news are often hand-tinkered server-side templating stuff, which is completely different to what Xtreme is doing.

Also if you did just change a bunch of text on a page and re-export from Xtreme, that wouldn't change the ordering of the image files, so you shouldn't have to worry about cached files corresponding with different images to before.

I've been doing more investigation, and it seems that the problem was only partly a caching issue (as a4hire suggests). What additionally seems to be happening is that some bitmaps are not uploaded - quite why this is I will have to further investigate an ftp problem maybe, but it seems weird that it manages 100 and misses out 3.

Further, it seems that my server is replacing the bitmaps where they are missing. It looks like some kind of spell check going on! Maybe then I can use this fact to haul things back on to topic for a Xara forum: it wouldn't be happening if the bitmaps had non-numerical names, I guess, but that is a stretch!

For instance 73.png is missing and if you try to load it it loads 37.png instead:

http://www.pearlcottage.co.uk/index.htm_files/73.png

If this is my hosting, is it normal, and does it have a name so that I can try to get it switched off?

Lee

Another thng you can do (but only once) is to type in the URL

http://pearlcottage.co.uk

Making a point to miss out the "www". Your browser will treat it as a different site and store any relevant content accordingly as before.

Also if you have four browsers on your system (and if you're a web designer you should have), IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari, this effectively gives you 8 different goes at viewing renewed content.

You should find however that if you are viewing pages locally (i.e. on your hard drive) that your browser checks for new content every time. As I've mentioned before though, if you want to avoid all the annoying security nonsense on Internet Explorer then use Firefox with the IE tab instead.

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Originally Posted by leemcg

If this is my hosting, is it normal, and does it have a name so that I can try to get it switched off?

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It is your hosting, it's semi-normal, and it's called mod_speling [sic].

I doubt you'll be allowed enough control to turn it off... it also looks like your host is running advertising on your 404 pages (eg. see http://pearlcottage.co.uk/sausages ), which is something I'd personally be quite upset about.

Obviously the more correct solution is to upload the missing file!

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Originally Posted by BobInce

It is your hosting, it's semi-normal, and it's called mod_speling [sic].

I doubt you'll be allowed enough control to turn it off... it also looks like your host is running advertising on your 404 pages (eg. see http://pearlcottage.co.uk/sausages ), which is something I'd personally be quite upset about.

Obviously the more correct solution is to upload the missing file!

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Thanks for that. Much more helpful than my web hosting company. And many apologies to all for this thread which has less and less to do with Xara.

I have now turned off the 404 advertising.

And I know that the right thing to do is to replace the right file. I'm not even sure why, at the moment, that almost every bitmap uploaded corrected except a couple. I was just hoping that when it does go wrong again, that I can get a blank instead of a dubious graphic popping up.

Regards
Lee