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How to Force a Refresh in Google Chrome

This one is for all the developers who are still pulling their hair out because they can’t get Google Chrome to refresh the page.

I’m thinking that this mostly applies to sites that have an ‘expires-header’ set, but I could be wrong. Regardless of what the core issue is – you just want to refresh the damn page, so let’s get right to it.

Forcing Chrome to Refresh a Page

Step One – Open Up Dev Tools (ctrl + shift + i) or hit f12.

chrome dev tools bar

 

Next, click on the ‘network’ icon inside the dev tools bar, then look for the gear at the bottom right of the dev tools.

chrome network settings gear icon

You are so close to solving this nightmare now. Click that gear icon and you’ll be presented with a bunch of options (many of which are supremely cool, but let’s not worry about all of that now).

disable cache option in chrome dev tools

Click the ‘Disable cache’ box under the Network heading – on the right side of the page.

Reload the page - Hallelujah! You’ve just refreshed your cache for this page.

Posted in Google, Web Design.

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By David Pavlicko – January 16, 2012

Protect Your Reputation Online AND Offline

Review sites are everywhere on the internet today – local business directories such as Google Places and Superpages and social apps like UrbanSpoon and Yelp, and of course –  those strictly negative review sites like complaints [dot] com and RoR (I refuse to link to these sites). If you’re a business owner and you’re not actively monitoring your reputation these days, take a moment and do a quick search for your business name on google, then do it again and add review afterwards….or better still, see what Google’s autocomplete adds on it’s own.

Reviews, Scams, Complaints – oh my.

Even if everyone of our customers love us, that doesn’t mean the reviews being posted about your business will always represent that. It’s ridiculously easy to leave an anonymous complaint on any of these ‘review’ sites, and there are a lot of businesses that have taken the low-road and done just that to their competitors. If you’re one of those scumbags, just know that karma is a b*tch.

If the complaints are legitimate, however, then it’s time to pony up and get to work fixing that reputation before it does your business too much harm. Because unlike those days of old, nothing gets forgotten on the internet. Respond as best you can, and if that doesn’t work then go about producing a ton of content to bury those review sites past the first page of results.  It’s tough (and costly) work, but it can be done.

Offline Actions Can Lead to Online Nightmares

So the good news, if there is any,  is that you can control the visibility of those review sites on the internet to some extent – or at a minimum, at least post a response to their complaints.

But what do you do if your idiot employee does something ‘offline’ , like enter ‘lady chinky eyes’ as a description for a customer on a pizza take-out receipt?

This has got to be every business owner’s nightmare. How do you ensure that this won’t happen to you?

You can’t, unfortunately. But you CAN be pro-active about instituting a positive workplace for your employees, and help them treat your customers the way they should be treated – with respect and gratitude.

Posted in Social Media.

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By David Pavlicko – January 13, 2012

Can YaCy Compete Against Google?

You’ve heard about Yacy – the new peer to peer search engine, right?

In a nutshell, they believe that Google (and bing and yahoo – to a lesser extent) have become the ‘gatekeepers’ of information on the internet, allowing access only to the content they deem worthy. On their site they declare:

Only a decentralized search engine technology can ensure free access to knowledge

…and honestly, it’s hard to find fault with that statement.

That’s what YaCy is attempting to be. An open-source, decentralized, peer to peer search engine that eliminates both tracking and censorship. That’s right – this search engine is powered only by the processing power of the computers that are running it.

Always one to help out the open-source community, I decided to give it a try. After clearing out some hard drive space (it asks that 30 gigs of free space be available on the drive you’re installing to – I’m not sure why, and I’m not sure I want to know why, either), I installed YaCy without any real issues. Installation took less than a minute, and I’m running a Windows desktop. It also runs on Mac and linux, for all you hipsters and geeks.

Eco-saving, peer to peer powered search may sound great in theory, but in real life it’s pretty darn sluggish to use when only a few thousand people are running it. It also makes searching for anything an exercise in frustration as the content of the search engines itself and the ranking of the sites included is entirely left up to the community of YaCy users. After 5 minutes of attempting to get a single search result, I quit. Unfortunately, it continued to run in the background for another 10 minutes or so before finally closing.

So, is there a chance that YaCy can actually gain momentum and be a small ray of sunshine to fight back the ever growing shadow of our dark search overload – Google?  For the answer, let’s check out the search volume query popularity of  ’YaCy’ during the last 30 days and see how much steam it’s gained.

yacy search popularity

bummer.

Well, that sucks. Guess we can just move on, now.

Posted in Search Marketing.

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By David Pavlicko – December 20, 2011