In those days when the number of disciples was increasing, the Grecian Jews among them complained against the Hebraic Jews because their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. Acts 6:1

Don’t you hate it when you leave he house, forgetting to include something important? How about this, don’t you REALLY hate it when you can’t remember something you learned a while back, such as a Bible verse … or the syntax to a computer language ? Yeah, that’s me today.

I wanted to employ what is known as a Server Side Include on a particular page of mine …

… which is why I once again found myself at Google, looking for a quick refresher on Server Side Includes. Here’s the one that got it done for me … The Server Side Includes Tutorial.

For those of you who don’t know, SSI are a nifty way to get your web server to interpret your web document before sending it to the target client/browser. Think of it as pre-chewed meat !-)

Because the computer serving up your web document gets a first crack at your document, you can do some stuff programatically, provided you put the right tags in your .SHTML document. These tags are what as known as the “includes.”

So why and what to include you ask (you’re suppose to ask that now) ? Well for one, consistency and modularity. Okay that was two, but they’re tightly coupled. A good example of this is the header and or footer on your website. Of the later, its often the copyright, contact and text links to your site. It’s SOOO much easier just to modify and maintain one file. Server Side Includes (SSI) provide a mechanism to do this … for example:

You can also “call” other programs to do stuff … er … programatically. For me, it is usually a little PERL hack to deliver something dynamic. There are several other ways you can shoot yourself in the foot as well … and rather than plagiarize the entire known world, here is the link to the easier-to-navigate, book style” version of the aforementeioned tutorial (and as a little bandwidth saving reward for those of you who read stuff till the bitter end !-).

So quit overlooking the geeks in your daily distribution of web content, experiment with SSI and see if it doesn’t save you some time in maintenance … unless of course you’re one of them server side script language coders … we’ll deal with you guys later.