Wednesday, November 20th, 2013

Force Chrome to refresh a page

How to Make Chrome display your new web page content without emptying your cache

I use Dreamweaver for my sites and Chrome as my preferred browser but I came close to throwing Chrome out the window these last few days.

You see, Chrome doesn’t like updating your pages which means that if you’re revamping pages as I have been it is perilously slow in delivering the new content to you. In fact, today I checked out a page I edited 4 days ago and while the text is up to date the images were not.

Trying the regular keyboard shortcuts just didn’t work – any key with F5 such as Shift + F5, Control + F5, the reload button Shift + R etc, etc.. I tried them all and nothing works.

I don’t particularly want to have to empty my cache to see the new content – it’s like throwing out a heap of good stuff just to display a page – it shouldn’t have to be done. This browser should work better!

Turns out it does…

….when you know how!

So here’s 2 ways to force Chrome to refresh a page:

1  Click on the page and press Control + Shift + I to display the Developer Tools.  Now, instead of clicking the button to the left of the address bar – right click it to open the menu. Choose Hard Reload – that should ignore the contents of the cache and reload page content and images from the server. This menu only appears if DevTools are enabled.

If that doesn’t work:-

2  Go to the DevTools panel at the foot of the screen and, in the bottom right corner, locate Settings (the gear icon) and click it.

Now check the  Disable Cache (while DevTools is open) checkbox and reload the page – voila! too easy! Yeah… your page appears.


Leave the panel open while you work.

Close it when you’re done.

There… you knew there was a secret to it – and now you’re in on it, but please, don’t keep it to yourself – spread it around, tweet it, share it!

 

 

Helen Bradley

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Categories:Dreamweaver

posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:00 amNo Comments links to this post

Tuesday, November 27th, 2012

First 24 hours with your new Mac

Ok, yep, I just bought a brand spanking new MacAir – for a few reasons and one is its weight – it is so so light with its solid state drive. I got a 13 inch one with 8GB ram and 256 Gb drive but on reflection I really think I could have done with the 11.6 version except this larger screen does have a higher resolution.

So enough of my new toy – it’s a while since I’ve owned a Mac and while some things are all so familiar, many are not. Here’s my take on what I’ve learned so far.

1 Download Chrome and use it – I don’t like Safari much at all.

2 When you install Office 2011 Mac you’ll get an error asking you to close Safari. The red button in the top corner might close the screen but it doesn’t actually close the program – go figure! Instead you need to find it on the dock and right click it and choose Quit. Oh! your mouse only has one button? – Yikes! The shortcut is to Control + Click on the Safari button and then you can choose Quit. Then Office installs just fine.

3 Weather! If you swipe to the right (or press Control + Right Arrow) a cute little desktop appears with a calculator, calendar, weather and clock. Problem is that the weather is inevitably going to be the wrong city. Well check and look for the little i icon – it is the information/settings option. Click it and you can select the weather for the place you are interested in viewing.

4 Keychain – it’s a tool for storing passwords so you don’t have to enter them every time – but the dialog doesn’t make it clear exactly what it does and it talks about ‘private’ information so it looks scarier than it is! Bottom line – I use it.

5 Open a web page in a new tab – Command + click on the link.

6 Take a shot of the Mac Screen – Command +Shift+3: Capture the screen to a file on the desktop – if you add Control to this the capture goes to the clipboard instead. Or Command+Shift+4 to select an area to be saved as a file on the desktop – add Control to save it to the Clipboard. There are other options but that’s the basics to remember.

7 Can’t find your newly installed Mac apps – click the Launch Pad icon and you’ll see everything that is installed. Once you know how to do this you can start cleaning up the dock and get rid of the things you don’t use to make way for those that you do – but that’s another day’s post!

Helen Bradley

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Categories:Mac

posted by Helen Bradley @ 6:37 amNo Comments links to this post

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2012

Make a Website a Chrome App

I’ve been working with Google Chrome a lot lately because it makes good sense as a Browser. I have my assistant to thank for this as, without his continual poking and prodding to explore Chrome I probably would not have got there as quickly as I did.

One of the nice things about Chrome is its integration with Google+. However it’s not Google+ that I plan talking about here but rather I want to show you how to add a website as an app to Chrome.

If you click the New Tab icon in Chrome and then click Apps at the foot of the page you’ll see that there are some apps already in the list such as YouTube, Gmail and so on. What I am going to show you is how to add your own choice of websites as apps and to do it quickly and easily.

You may already know that you can create an app from a Most Visited page. Click Most Visited at the foot of the New tab and anything that’s in that list can be easily created as an App by just dragging and dropping it onto the Apps icon. This automatically makes the page an App.

The problem is that if something isn’t a Most Visited page it’s a little cumbersome to make it an App. The solution is to click the New Tab icon and display the Apps page. Size your browser down so that you can see everything clearly.

Now click the New Tab icon again and this time browse to the page that you want to add as an App. Once you’ve visited that page drag the tab for that page somewhere else on the screen so that you have two browser windows – one showing the Apps area and the other one with your web page open in it.

Now locate the icon immediately to the left of the page URL that you want to add as an app. As you hold your mouse over it, it will show View Site Information as a tooltip.

Drag and drop this into the Apps area in your Chrome browser. It will automatically be added as a new App. You can then drag and drop that App or any others to rearrange them to suit.

An app can also be created as a Desktop, Taskbar or Start Menu shortcut. To do this right click the web page in the Apps area and choose Create Shortcut. You’ll get a series of shortcut options including Desktop, Start Menu and Pin to Taskbar. Select the checkboxes for those that you want to create and click Create.

There’s a lot of misinformation on the web regarding adding websites to the Chrome apps collection. A lot of sites suggest you repeatedly remove Most Visited pages until you get to the page that you want to add. This solution which involves simply dragging and dropping a URL into the page is far quicker and makes a lot more sense.

Helen Bradley

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Categories:office

posted by Helen Bradley @ 1:06 pm2 Comments links to this post