Planning For Growth With SSI
What is SSI? SSI is an acronym for server side includes and what
it does is allow you to make a change across hundreds or
thousands of pages by editing only one file.
What is it useful for? SSI is useful for managing your
navigation, header and footer files although there are many
other uses which I will touch base on later. By using ssi, you
can modify your navigation menu, header or footer and the
changes will be instant across every page on your side utilizing
the ssi by calling it via a tag in your page.
How do I do it? Ok, let's take a look at this page
http://www.business-opportunities-internetonline.com/resources/ed
ucational.shtml It looks like a complete web page but actually
it uses several ssi calls to include html from other pages.
The header is called from here
http://www.business-opportunities-internetonline.com/resources/he
ader.html
The footer is called from here
http://www.business-opportunities-internetonline.com/resources/fo
oter.html
The navigation menu is called from here
http://www.business-opportunities-internetonline.com/resources/na
vigation.html
You can view the source on each of those pages to see that is
just basic html with no head or body tags, you don't need those
as they will be on the main page that is calling these, you
don't need them more than once.
Placing the following tags on any page exactly where you want
that page to appear on your new page
The path in the tags above assumes that the header.html,
navigation.html and footer.html are in the same folder. If your
header, navigation and footer files were at the root of your
domain and you were designing a page one level down you would
use the tag
For this to work there are a couple of things that must happen.
First your server must support ssi, most decent hosting
companies do. Secondly, your pages should end with .shtml
instead of .html, the server is configured to parse files ending
with that extension for ssi code.
If you have existing pages you would like to add the ssi into
but don't want to change the extension from .html to .shtml, you
can still use it by editing your .htaccess file. If you are
unsure what this file is, I would suggest not messing with it.
But for those that are comfortable doing so, you can add the
following to your .htaccess file
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .html .shtml AddType
text/html .shtml AddHandler server-parsed .shtml
This will tell the server to treat .html extensions as .shtml
and the pages will be parsed for your tags. The reason it's not
configured to do this automatically is because it does cause a
little more work for the server but unless you are receiving
massive traffic (thousands of visitors a day), you will not
notice.
About the author:
About the author.. Tom Moore(BricktownTom)is not a real author
but is a real person so please bear with me as I try my best to
share the information that is inside my head and convey that to
the written word!
http://www.business-opportunities-internetonline.com/
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republish as long as the "about the author" box remains intact
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