SSI – Server Side Includes is a really nice thing!  I am in the process of updating my site.  I use dreamweaver and notepad++ to edit my site.  Which means that sometimes I am unable to use a template properly.  In this case, I edited some of the pages with notepad and didn’t realize it was part of the template.  During the process of editing I realized I had many small mistakes that needed to be corrected.  This left me with very few choices.

  • Redo the template and attach the pages to it again
  • Edit each page manually
  • Find something that is like a template

I found option 3 with a google search.  In fact, the site that worked the best for me was Easy Web Tutorials.com.  It lays it out very easily for me to understand.  In a nutshell, I can create another web page with the code on it and then call that page from another page.  This works great for headers, footers and menus.  Change 1 item and all the pages changed.  It says that the pages should use a special extension of either .shtml or .shtm.  However, it also says one can use .html or .htm if you edit the .htaccess file.  I chose this last option and added this line to my .htaccess file: “AddHandler server-parsed .html .htm”

This brings me to the part of how do I call this code in another webpage?  The first thing I tried was my footer.  So in this instance I would have to type in <!–#include virtual=”footer.html”–> where I wanted the code to go.  There is another way to use SSI which can include the output of a cgi script.

The article does state that not all hosting companies support server side but I think it is an apache function which means most do.