Clear your cache!

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good morning!

A new website release was issued yesterday. One of the changes we made was to remove all of the images from the Java *.war file and to put them on a separate Apache server. Images that are compiled into the Java program cause redirects each time they are downloaded, which means that visitors needed to make two requests to download them. Not only does that slow down the page load time, but Google also penalizes that in search results.

An additional advantage of this change is that Chris can now update coin images the same day when support tickets appear asking for those images to be updated, rather than having to wait until a new version of the website can be released.

Unfortunately, however, some customers have browsers that aren't expiring their caches automatically and therefore they are still viewing old versions of the website. That has resulted in about 50,000 404 errors per hour when these customers' browsers follow the old links. To resolve this issue, you can clear your cache by pressing CTRL-SHIFT-[DEL] on Windows. If you don't want to delete your entire cache, there are options to do it for just this site.

I don't know what the command is for other operating systems, but perhaps someone can reply here with how to do it on Apple products.