A Very Quick Introduction to Server Side Includes (SSI)

The times they are a-changin’.

This post seems to be older than 16 years—a long time on the internet. It might be outdated.

I haven’t used SSI for years. I think I can safely say it’s been at least 5 years since I last used SSI. Apparently, it’s still alive and well though. My cousin, Nick, has been learning web design and asking me all sorts of questions. I keep tabs on what he’s doing and point him in various directions to new things he might be interested in.

The latest was SSI. I noticed that he had a few pages, all with the same navigation bar, and thought to myself, Hmm…what’s the easiest way to replace this? Oh, I know SSI!

I then said to myself, Crap, it’s been a while since I wrote, let alone even seen, any SSI directives.

So I did a bit of research, whipped up a quick site to show off how cool SSI is, and then included some links to some decent SSI pages.

I was even able to do some fancy .htaccess and linking to show the workings of the SSI pages I made without having duplicates (in the traditional sense).

View the Very Quick SSI Introduction

I did a cp -l to link the files to a new directory and then placed the follow in the .htaccess file to have them display and not execute as either SSI or HTML:

Options -Includes
AddType text/plain .shtml
AddType text/plain .html

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