[RESOLVED] Image cache requires to be disabled or worked around.

[IgglePiggle]

Hi everyone,
thank you for taking the time to respond to my thread, i am sure that any insight you have to my particular issue will be beneficial.

The situation:
I have a contact page with a world map. When the user hovers over the dot on the map that signifies an office, a hover effect will appear that is a div containing a background image.

This background image is generated using php gd and is an image with the offices local time stamped onto it. This is working fine.

The issue:
As you can guess if the local time is to be stamped onto the image then this requires to be accurate. Unfortunately the images are being cached and therefore are displaying the incorrect time.

What have I tried so far:
I have researched cache disabling and have tried a few things before I annoy you guys and girls.

1: Setting headers, Pragma(for the ssl) and Expire headers only prevent cacheing of the actual html page, the images are still cached.

2: I experimented with incremental filenames for the images. The image creation process goes:

Get original image from media/images/.png
Add time stamp.
Save new image to /media/images/contact-hovers/.png

I have modified the script to save the image to /media/images/contact-hovers/*-timestamp.png and as its not second sensitive this would actually work, however as each PNG is 36Kb, eventually this will gather in size to a max of 800Gb. So errr yeah really not a valid solution.

Any ideas of where I should be focusing next?

[cretaceous]

workarounds:
a)
create a set of images of each digit then display them in a row as needed
(maybe requires 30 images - left edge, right edge and middle... )
but doesn't work for background image: therefore change the html /css !

b) run a cron clean up every x hours and delete all old images

[IgglePiggle]

Hi all,
sorry I have not posted to this thread sooner but I have been unwell over the past week. Still, going to reply and mark as resolved.

The above response was one that I had considered but wanted to avoid due to the fact that I wanted to not have the background process.

Anyway, if anyone else is having this issue avoid trying to get around cacheing, its just a pain and can be done in an easier manner.

Use unset() or exec() to empty the folder upon every refresh of the page and have the images generated using filename-hours-mins.png and have the page use these images instead. It avoids the neccessity to have a cron but does have the downside of requiring added processing power.

[cretaceous]

good solution
did you consider Flash ? - at least you could get styled fonts in there
but a fair bit of actionscript to write for a small feature!

[IgglePiggle]

CEO uses an iPad.

Le sigh.

[cretaceous]

ah, the delights of technology wars

[IgglePiggle]

Its not really technology wars as such, there is several things I would like to use flash for, C+P to clipboard for example which is made considerably easier by using flash. However developing something and then not have it working on the man that signs off your paycheck might be seen as a bad idea, despite the reason for it not working.

[cretaceous]

I didn't mean your place of work, I meant Apple v. Adobe
and they used to be such good buddies..

[Weedpacket]

cretaceous wrote:

did you consider Flash ? - at least you could get styled fonts in there

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS/@font-face