Auto-refresh?

[Mirfus]

I need a way of setting, say...a text file on my root which can be read by a cookie which my website installs. The cookie will check the date from the text file and refresh the website pages (or delete appropriate cache files -- if that can be done) if the date is newer than the one last defined in the cookie.

This way, as I update the site I will update the date in the text file so that visitors will always see the most current versio nof the home page instead of having to refresh it manually.

My problem is that although this seems a good idea to me, it may be fatally flawed. Even if it's sound, I haven't a clue how to go about making it happen....

Please help (any comments appreciated)

Mirf

[Spookster]

Why go through all that trouble when you can just use a meta tag to tell the browser to request the latest version of your page from the server.

< META NAME="expires" CONTENT="0">

[brothercake]

That meta-tag won't work for people who surf through a proxy - which includes anyone who comes through a LAN proxy, and virtually all AOL users.

The only *guaranteed* way is to generate non-cacheable pages in the first place.

[Mirfus]

I have noticed that AOL behaves differently...seems my idea is flawed then, oh well.

Spookster: How would I go about making these 'non-cacheable' pages?

Thanks