OT--HTML coding question

[Matt Graham]

From: Mark Jarvis <m.jarvis at cox.net>
> I have a web site with a large number of hand coded pages. I have a 
> block of code that needs to be inserted into each page. The problem is 
> that the block will change occasionally as new material is added. 
> Obviously, things would be much simpler if I could make the change in 
> one place and have each page attach/include/link to/etc. a file 
> containing that piece of code. If there is an HTML construct that allows 
> that, I haven't found it.

It's called "server-side includes", and it's relatively standard if you're
using Apache.  You have to have the directory you want to have server-side
includes enabled in with a config stanza kind of like so:

<Directory "/var/www/localhost/htdocs">
   Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes
</Directory>
# note that Includes is the option you want to have enabled for this dir.
# that's the docroot of my webhost; modify for your setup
# make sure to restart apache if you change the config file

Once this has been done, all you have to do is to put a construct like so into
foobar.html:

<!--#include virtual="/incs/nav.html" -->

...this tells apache that when it's reading foobar.html, it should read the
file /var/www/localhost/htdocs/incs/nav.html and insert that file's contents
into foobar.html at that point, before sending stuff to the client.[0]  This
is *really* useful.  At work, we basically depend on apache SSI to do 5 tons
of stuff, since many pages use the same stuff across the whole site for
navigation/menu bars/whatever.

If this didn't make any sense, holler.

[0] It can get a bit more complex than that, what with RewriteRules and other
stuff, but that'll get you started.

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see