[thelist] AOl proxy cache

[Warden, Matt]

On Tue, 17 Jul 2001, Bill Haenel wrote:

>Regarding the issue of AOL (and others including MSN) caching my site, and
>thus skewing my traffic stats, I sent out a message to thelist and got some
>great responses, including this one from Seb:
...
>So, I apporached my hosting provider with the idea of configuring Apache to
>serve up specific headers. Here's what they said:
>
>> For Caching I believe there is a way of coding where you can specify to
>the
>> browser that the pages should not be cached. I also think that AOL will
>not
>> cache PHP pages as they are scripting and can change each single time.
>
>Any comments as to the validity of this statement?

Yeah...

It's a bunch of hooey.

There's no way for AOL's proxy servers to know that it's a PHP script
that's coming through its pipes. Same with ASP scripts and Perl and CF and
Fooscript. There is a HTTP header named "Expires" that sets the date after
which the file should be re-requested from the server and there are a few
cache-specific HTTP headers, but I've seen AOL ignore a lot of them.

But, if you put them all in there, maybe you'll get AOL's proxy servers to
listen   ;-)

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22HTTP+Header+fields%22

Good luck.


--
mattwarden
mattwarden.com