In my other life as marketing director for Hosting Nation, I have the luxury of working in a development environment before placing anything live.  It’s a nice benefit. We can test design, applications and software and pretty much everything.

If you were a fly on the wall, you would hear three words at least once a day.  From me to a co-worker, from them to me or from me to a client.  It’s almost become a bit of a joke, something we utter every time something doesn’t look right.

“Clear your Cache”.

See, browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer save copies of some of your web files.  Stuff like your stylesheets, graphics and images and processes that run in the background.  They do it so that they can load pages more quickly the second time around.  The pitfall is that when you make changes and upload them to the live server, if you don’t clear your cache before viewing the content you often won’t see the differences.  I’ll tell you now, it can be extremely frustrating.  I’ve seen it result in the hapless mashing of F5 like a rookie gamer playing Street Fighter against the world champ.  I’ve seen it cause grown adults to act like the angry german kid (warning – explicit content – NSFW) and it takes 2 minutes to fix.

Here’s how to do it. (source, wikihow)

Internet Explorer 8

1. Once your browser is open, click the Tools menu and select Internet Options.
2. Be sure the General tab is selected.
3. Under “Browsing history”, click “Delete…”
4. In the new window, be sure the Temporary Internet Files box is checked. You can uncheck everything else you don’t want to delete.
5. Click Delete.

Firefox 1.5 / 2.0 / 3.0

1. Below is the full method, although it is possible to simply go to Tools, and select Clear Private Data, or to just press Ctrl+Shift+Delete. Please note that these options clear what you have set the browser to clear in Tools > Options… > Privacy, which can mean the cache, although it may also include passwords, and search and browsing history, so be careful.
2. Go to Tools and select Options….
3. Go to the Privacy tab, and click Settings… (in the blue box in the image).
4. Select what you would like to have cleared.
5. Return to the Options menu. If you want your cache cleared automatically, every time you close the browser, click the appropriate checkbox (shown in red in an earlier image).
6. Press “Clear Now” under the Settings button.

WikiHow shows you methods for several older versions of IE and Firefox.  If you use Safari, Opera or Chrome use your favourite search engine to find instructions.

The worst part?  We all know better and still forget at least once a day. Maybe writing this post will help.