SSI - where to start??

What platform are you using?

I really don't know of any SSI specific resources off hand. In ASP an include file is treated as if it was part of the parent document, and is processed before any ASP code. It's quite simple by just using the following line:

Replace "file" with "virtual" if you want to link to the resource virtually (always from root)

*rubbing hands with glee*

Check out the resources at wdvl.com -- excellent stuff on SSI and other server-side languages that use includes.

I have used the concept in Java, SSI, PHP and ASP and I totally love it.

For the record, I do it two ways (no snickering from the peanut gallery):

1. use holder pages so that you can provide unique meta tags for what appear to be hard coded pages (but are really just shells filled with only includes). this is a hybrid measure that works nicely for smaller sites, sites with predominantly static content, and sites where the maintaince folks are comfie with editing raw files (not through a content management system).

2. use a template or series of templates where you pull in the content through a database.

The nice thing about #1 is that it can be *very* easily transitioned into #2 without much pain at all. Set up a template and use queries instead -- all the content is broken out from the design anyway.

Suzanne

I have a high majority of the pages on this site (504 currently in total) with the various search engines and I still want to use these pages, keeping them called the same with the same .html extension otherwise we'll loose a hell of a lot of good rankings! What I want is an easier way of setting out the header & footer of the pages so that if something needs changing I can just change one page (after initially changing all 504 to whatever to get this working!) which will be a lot quicker obviously.

Am I going to be able to do this?

Change the extensions to .shtml You can then do some funky stuff to your .htaccess so it takes all .html requests and looks for a .shtml file.

I guess another option is to add .html to the SSI handler.

OMG! I am now sooooooooooooo lost!! I think I'll wait until after Christmas and then take some time out to read up on this stuff. Do I need to get my hosting company to do anything or check anything on the server for all this to work?

The .htaccess is the best way for you to go (in my opinion )

Just create a text file with the following in it

AddType text/x-server-parsed-html .html
AddType text/x-server-parsed-html .htm

save it as something.txt
upload it to your base directory
rename it ".htaccess"
then your html pages will be parsed as shtml pages and you can use SSI without renaming your files

Mika

Don't be lost, Julia, SSI is a piece of cake. As is .htaccess.

This is the tutorial I learned from:

http://www.webmasterbase.com/article.php/27

Thanks, that gives me a bit of light reading over Christmas!!!