server side includes

Imagine that you have 1000 web pages, each with a description of one of your products. At the bottom of each web page, you have your address and phone number so that people can contact you. But you just found out that your area code is changing next month, so you need to update all of your web pages! What are you going to do?

You could edit each file one at a time, but that would take a long time. You could also ask someone to write a program for you to go through all 1000 files, find the offending phone number, and change it. But there's an even better way.

Server Side Includes (also known as SSI) let you modify only one file, and the rest are automatically updated. By embedding a single SSI directive into your web page, you can tell it to include the contents of another file or show the last date that a page was modified automatically. Taken a step further, you can even use SSI to create the entire design for your site! Once that design changes, all of your pages will be automatically updated!

For example, look at what the source for this page really looks like. Do you see the lines at the top and the bottom that say "#INCLUDE VIRTUAL..."?

This tells the server to insert the page referenced by these directives right into your document! The banner across the top, logo on the top left, and graphics on the left are all stored in only one place so only one change ever needs to be made to update the entire web site!

Other sources of information on SSI:

  • Apache Week article on using SSI
  • The actual Apache documentation on SSI mostly for system administrators.
  • A tutorial from NCSA, creators of the World Wide Web.

    • Please send mail to support@mallorn.com with any questions that you may have.