.htaccess Files

What are the elements?

[CyberSpaced]

I was digging through my logs a couple days ago when I noticed I was getting about 30 hits a day for an advertisment I no longer run. It didn't make sense to me until I realized it was cached in AOL's servers. It got me checking around, and I really want to create a .htaccess file to cover this problem.

But I've been looking around and every place I see a that file it's being used for password authorization. Can anyone help me build a simple 10-day cache .htaccess file?

Thanks.

[DaveAtIFG]

I don't think you can do this with .htaccess, here's [bignosebird.com] a list of the Apache directives. Notice under "Deny" for example, the "Context" includes .htaccess, but the caching related directives do not, and may not be used in the .htaccess file.

AOL provides info here [webmaster.aol.com] about how to manage what they cache. It's the only way I know to do it, unfortunately, it's on a page by page basis...

[Brett_Tabke]

How is the add being served? If you have control, you can add a No Cache/cache control header to the graphic to stop the graphic from being cached by proxy servers.

[CyberSpaced]

The add is server off another server. The problem is that I don't control the other server. It works like this;

On my main page six months ago I added an advertisement. Three months ago I removed it. I checked, and I'm still getting hits on that banner, which I can only attibute to caching. The number of hits on the banner equals the number of AOL visitors I have to my main site, so that tells me it's AOL's cache that I'm out of date on.

Any ideas?