Script of the Day: reload.js

reload.js is a JS tool for automatically reloading a page on a given time interval, without actually pressing the browser Refresh button (or F5).

It is certainly not one of the most complicated scripts ever featured in our “Script of the Day” series, but extremely useful when working on a web-related project.

Imagine how many times a developer modifies the source code, saves it, goes back to the browser, presses refresh and waits for the changes to appear. If not what he wanted, he goes back to the source code, makes some new changes and the process starts over again.

reload.js spares the programmer of that little gesture of pressing refresh and then waiting every time he wants to view an updated version of his page.

For smaller pages, a smaller interval can be used with no worries. For larger, JS-heavy pages, a bigger time span would be needed between refreshes.

reload.js can be used when developing CSS, HTML, PHP, JS, LESS, or any other language that outputs to the browser.

The source code is hosted on GitHub.

Download reload.js from our Scripts section here.