Refresh page automatically on arrival

[Milo]

Hi all,
Thought this would be a quick find, but have had no luck yet. I'm looking for a code (not meta) that refreshes the content of my page on arrival. We constantly update our homepage (daily, not every minute) with new products. Although not very often, we do have some of our shoppers ordering products that were taken down a while ago. I did find a meta code that can refresh the page constantly, but you have to specify increments and its continuous, I only want it done once. Also, further research of this meta code has shown that search engines don't like this code.
Any info will be helpfull.
Cheers.
Miles

[MHenscheid]

Are you using any server side code or just plain html?

The best way to do this is to ensure that the page does not get cached. Your solution of "refreshing once" is proablaby not the best way to do this and may be the cause of your not finding anything. Do a search for "prevent page caching" or something similar.

If you are using ASP, you can add a line to the top of the page:

<% Response.ExpiresAbsolute=#Jan 01, 1980 00:00:00# %>

There are other methods, to prevent caching. I think including Meta tags, but not content-refresh (or whatever it is).

If you REALLY have to do a new page load, you could do it like this (with either server side or client side script):
1) User comes to www.site.com/default.asp
2) Script checks for existance of query string with variable "time"
3) The first page view, the script will not find this variable
4) Redirect to www.site.com/default.asp?time=[currentTime]
5) Script now finds appropriate variable in the querystring and displays the page

This is almost the same as not caching, since the browser has never seen this page with [currentTime] in the query string.