Simplify Site Maintenance with SSI

© 2004, John Calder
http://www.TheEzine.net

Server Side Includes (SSI), for many marketers, are a bit like the U.S. National Security Agency - it's something you've heard of, but you don't understand completely what they do. In this article, rather than bore you with the technical details, let's just take a look at the benefits and drawbacks of implementing SSI on your site, to see if learning the technical details is worth the trouble.

SSI has several capabilities, but for our purposes, we just want to make our site easier to maintain. For example, if we want to change a color, we normally have to make that change separately on every page of our site. Five or ten pages isn't really a problem, but what if you have 100, 200, or thousands? Even a simple addition of a menu item will take hours, and the chances of making an error increase. SSI will let us easily make such changes, one time, and apply them across your entire site.

Here's where SSI comes in. Let's just imagine that we take one of our web pages, and divide it into three sections, a top, middle, and bottom, much like a sandwich. The "meat" of the sandwich is our content on each page that's different. But the "bread" is the same on every page. What we can do is move the top "slice of bread" to a "top" file, and the bottom "slice" to a "bottom" file.

Then on our original page, add a one line command to tell the server to "include" the top file, and another one line command to "include" the bottom file. Now, you can make a change to your "top" file for example, and the change will be automatically applied to every page on your site that "includes" the top file.

There is a bit of extra resource use on the server to implement SSI. However with today's powerful servers, it's not the issue that it once was. Most hosting companies support use of SSI, and you are usually able to change a setting so that you can continue to use .html extensions.