Hi!
I run an adoptable pet website, PixelWoods. Users can adopt pets that grow with clicks, basically. I’m trying to write a script to allow them to choose hats to put on said pets and everything works except for the problem I’ll describe shortly.
Each pet is stored in a different row and has a unique id. Users are given a BBCode for each that looks something like this (in this example the pet has an id of 123):
[img]http://www.pixelwoods.com/get/123.gif[/img]The problem is that the image doesn’t update unless you refresh the page. So swapping hats does nothing until the dynamic image is refreshed. I can only assume that the browser has a cache of the image which it prefers over the new image.
The process for getting a pet’s image for a pet with the id 123 is like this:
Image link users use to display their pet ( pixelwoods.com/get/123.gif )
.htaccess redirects to pixelwoods.com/image_b.php, which compiles image and saves to a server-side cache.
image_b.php redirects (via header tag) to the cached image
I assume my browser only gets as far as /get/123.gif and pulls its cached image of it out - is there any way around this? One that doesn’t involve the user having to update their image link.
Any direction is much appreciated!