Force Browser Refresh

[Nosmo_King]

I'm playing with banner/ad rotators.

One of the problems is ads not changing - ie: the same banner is displayed on a page change. I understand this can be resolved by forcing a browser refresh on each page load.

I could do this with meta tags:
<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache">
<meta http-equiv="cache-control" content="no-store">

Is this the best way to do it or does someone know something better?

[morleymouse]

i use a simple php solution on most of my sites, see below.

PHP Code:

<? srand((double)microtime()*1000000);
$number = rand(1,3);
$advert1 = 'banner code 1';
$advert2 = 'banner 2';
$advert3 = 'banner 3';
$choice = "advert$number";
$adtoshow = ${$choice};
echo $adtoshow; 
?>

on each page reload it will just pick a banner at random, no weighting or anything though.

phpadsnew is the more advanced approach.

if you prefer JS then if you do a search for "javascript banner rotator" im sure your find a million

[Nosmo_King]

Not sure I follow - my php isn't that great.

So could I just creat a php script and call it from each page with an include?

I'm using phpadsnew for a few sites... but I have the same problem - ads not changing on each page change. Would like to get away from phpadsnew - it's great but a bit of a heavyweight for my traffic. I think it's cool if you want to serve up the same content to a number of sites - otherwise it's an overkill.

I've also got a few small sites running a simple php rotator with a text file which suffer the same problem. This is the route I would prefer to take - I want to perfect it so I can rotate graphics and text.

I'm sure I've read somewhere these things only work properly with a refresh. I'm using creative from various merchants... some of whom are straight html with no code to prevent caching.

[morleymouse]

where i've typed 'banner code 1' 2 3 etc you just paste the HTML or JS or whatever for that banner. Just make sure you dont include any ' in the code, swap them to " if possible or escape them with a backslash like \'

Pasting this code into a php file will, on every page reload show a random banne,r you might get the same one once or twice but its random. Alternatively put this code in a seperate PHP file on its own and include that file where you want the banner, that way you can change one file to update all your pages.