Making Animated gifs refresh

Forum Moderators: not2easy

Message Too Old, No Replies

Making Animated gifs refresh

tomhumf

1:05 pm on Nov 4, 2008 (gmt 0)

Hi,

I'm using blender to make some little 2 second animations. I am converting these to animated gifs for use on my site. They work fine the first time each page is loaded. They run once, not on a loop. The problem is they don't run again once you return to the page (i assume this is because the page has been cached by the brower so doesn't reload them?)

So basically I would like the gifs to reload every page view, regardless of it has been cached, but hoefully this wouldn't involve refreshing the whole page.

I did a search in webmaster world but only found this :

"Assuming your original setup, you should mark the graph.gif file as "no-cache,must-revalidate." Otherwise, your browser will assume it already has a copy, and it will not re-request it from your server."

Which sounds like what I need to do, but there is no further explanation. Can anyone shed some light?

Thanks

Cienwen

8:28 pm on Nov 4, 2008 (gmt 0)

I think you need to add this to your header

<HTTP-EQUIV="PRAGMA" CONTENT="NO-CACHE">

But you may want to check out this article about it on Microsoft.

[support.microsoft.com...]

rocknbil

10:06 pm on Nov 4, 2008 (gmt 0)

They run once, not on a loop.

Most animated .gif programs have a setting somewhere to set the iterations, you might look there or choose a different animation program.

Cienwen

10:10 pm on Nov 4, 2008 (gmt 0)

I was thinking he wanted it to play only once but every time the page was loaded (revisited).

You can set it to Forever instead of once in your image editor, for continual play.

tangor

11:56 pm on Nov 4, 2008 (gmt 0)

Set the gif to infinite loop. If it is good enough the first time it should be good enough at least three, four more times. After that ANY user will be annoyed by the animation.

tomhumf

3:19 pm on Nov 5, 2008 (gmt 0)

Hi,

Thanks for your replies. I am going to try out the first suggestion from Cienwen, although I suppose it would be nice to be able to cache the rest of the content apart from the gifs for faster page loads. From what I can see this way nothing from the page will be cached?

I do know how to loop the gifs, but I don't want them to, as I think it would look a bit cheesey.

I only really started using them as gifs because I couldn't find a way to embed avi files in a way that works on all browers and doesn't have a player attached. I'm sure there would be a way to do this, but the file size of the gifs is smaller...I don't know what the advantages of each method would be?

I'll let you know how i get on
Cheers

travelin cat

12:49 am on Nov 6, 2008 (gmt 0)

I don't know what the advantages of each method would be?

The animated gif is supported by pretty much every browser made, has been around since 1989 and as you noted requires no player.

If you are happy with the animation, I would go with the .gif

tangor

1:14 pm on Nov 10, 2008 (gmt 0)

Looped animations are okay. The icky factor depends on the content looped. There are many major websites, usually entertainment based, which display looped graphics (gif or flash) and are not obnoxious. Go with your gut: "Can I watch this over and over?" or "Where do I find the guy and throttle him?" :)

The SIZE of the animation on the screen also plays in the icky factor. Small animated images are less obtrusive than large ones.