Server Side Includes

Benefits of Server side includes

Server side includes allow us to include information from a text file into a normal html page when the page is being requested from the server (i.e. when someone is browsing your page).

This is a good system to use if you don't want or cannot use ASP or PHP code. You use your normal HTML pages but they need to be renamed from yourpage.html to yourpage.shtml

You can for example put a header in an ssi file and then use a single line of code on each page to "include" the file that makes up the header.

For example if your file is called header.txt, you would simply paste the following code where you wanted the header text to appear.

<!--#include file="header.txt" -->

You can also do some cool things like tell the user their IP address, the date and time at which a document was served to them or even include the output of a CGI application like a hit counter.

Used properly, server side includes can greatly enhance a website. They are easy to use but you need to enable SSI on your web server or get your web host to do it for you. The following site will teach you everything you need to know about SSI.

Art Sackett