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Any site with more than three pages that has any
content which is repeated through multiple pages should
be using Server Side Includes (SSI). A SSI is a file
containing that repeated content and each page that
uses it would simply point to that file.
The major benefit of SSI is that if this repeated
content needs to change, you won't need to go through
all the pages to change it, only one file.
For example, this page uses three SSIs, the header,
the navigation buttons to the left and the footer
at the bottom of the page. To show how these are separate
files, click on any of the following links:
navbar.html
header.html
footer.html
The way these files get inserted is by using the
following text where you want the content to appear:
<!--#include file="navbar.html"-->
That line is in the source code where the navigation
buttons should appear. When the server reads that
line, it finds the file named navbar.html and replaces
the single line with the entire contents of the file.
Frequently, SSI will have the extension .ssi. This
is not required. Also, do not put <html> or
<body> tags into your include file. Only put
in the file what you want literally included into
your web page.
One more step exists to make SSIs a success. The
server needs to be informed that the web page contains
SSI. This can be achieved one of two ways. The first
is to give the page a .shtml extension instead of
.html.
The second way is to create a .htaccess file and
put this file in your web directory. A tool has been
created for you to generate this file. .htaccess
Tool Scroll down to "Server-parse .html and
.htm files; cache period:", check the box and
enter a 0 in the text field. Click the "Generate
.htaccess File" button, copy the result into
a text file, name the file ".htaccess" (make
sure there is no extension on this file and the first
character is a period. Upload this file into the same
directory containing web pages with the SSI.
Other variables
You can also use some Apache server variables in your
web pages. Examples are seen below.
| Description |
HTML
code |
Server
Parsed |
| Local Date |
<!--#echo
var="DATE_LOCAL"--> |
Wednesday, 08-May-2002
09:47:08 EDT |
| Last Modified |
<!--#echo
var="LAST_MODIFIED"--> |
Tuesday, 07-May-2002
11:00:30 EDT |
| Name of Document |
<!--#echo
var="DOCUMENT_NAME"--> |
local.shtml
|
| URI to Document |
<!--#echo
var="DOCUMENT_URI"--> |
/webmaster/webpublishing/local.shtml
|
| Request Method |
<!--#echo
var="REQUEST_METHOD"--> |
GET |
|
