seeing latest updates

Are You Seeing Our Latest?

TRY CTRL-F5 REPEATEDLY AND PLEASE CHECK FROM YOUR HOME PC OR OUTSIDE THE NHSNET BEFORE CONTACTING US IF THE CHANGES YOU EXPECTED HAVE NOT APPEARED.

We update your Web pages usually on the same day and inform you that this has been done. 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 local 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. We find people accessing pages from within the NHSnet connection (on your practice machines) have more problems. Ideally the browser checks to see if the page needs updating before it serves you a stale page. But not always.

Clearing your cache:
https://kb.iu.edu/data/ahic.html

Internet Explorer,
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie6/using/howto/customizing/clearcache.mspx 
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 graphics, and are designed to load quickly even if you have a slow connection. Using Microsoft Explorer try fooling your cache by "zeroing out" the History option so that the browser does not keep a history of where you have been for more than one day.

Firefox
http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/tips


Different Browser Solutions
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 addition to your browser, some organizations (NHSnet!) or Internet Service Providers also cache or save Web pages and supply them to the next one of their users 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.

Other Tips and suggestions
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. Ctrl-F5 can sometimes work as well as adding a question mark to the URL in the address bar, for example if the page you are looking at normally has the following address http://www.bbc.co.uk try http://www.bbc.co.uk? .
Try accessing the webpage from a machine that has not previously looked at that page.
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.