Gotta question for ya Vishal :)

[Jason Gazaway]

Hey Buddy

Alright.. This has been buggin me for some time now..

It's obvious you have tons of content on your main website. And I noticed that you have the "footer" on every single page without using any php driven, automatically updated script whereas you only edit one file and so long as you have the php code where the "footer" is placed, it will show up on everypage you add the code to..

I took the liberty (hope you don't mind ) to view your source code on 10 different random webpages on your main site, and to my surprise, they are all in html format. Now this leads me to believe that this might be done using some html code, or what? Because just recently, you have added all the categories included in the "footer" portion of your site.. And this would be nearly impossible and dang near with all the pages you have, as it'd take so much time to go through EACH and EVERY page to add one small line of html code so se spiders can crawl everypage (which is why I'm assuming you recently did that)..

Please enlighten me Vishal! I've been doing things the hard way, but if there's an easier way to add things, I'd much rather do it that way!

For example.. Let's say I want to add an achive of "Copywriting 101" with informative articles as such.. Now this wouldn't be a pain in the rear to add to just one or two pages, but if you have 50+ pages, it can be very tiresome to keep adding the same code to each individual page!

And another thing Vishal.. You opinion of course. You rank very well for keywords I am targeting as well, so I figure you might know If someone DOES use a php code, ie:

[Vishal P. Rao]

Good question Jason

I use something called Server Side Includes (SSI) to achieve that.

In technical jargon, Server Side Includes are directives which you can place into your HTML documents to execute other programs or output such data as environment variables and file statistics. If your only intention is to manage your website more effectively and painlessly, it is more than enough if you learn one "Directive" of SSI - the "Include" directive. In simple terms, SSI Include is a line of code which you can use in your HTML documents to include contents from other documents. In other words, change just one file (the Include file), and your entire site is instantly updated.

The basic syntax of an Include directive is:
<!--#include virtual="PATH_TO/INCLUDE_FILE" -->
Where PATH_TO is the "VIRTUAL" path to include file on your server.
Here's how to include your copyright info and navigation links using SSI Includes...

First, you need to check with your server administrator whether your server supports SSI or not. Most servers support them. Second, you need to rename all your HTML files with extension .shtml. You can start with one file and if everything goes fine, rename rest of the files.

-----SIDE BAR-----
There is alternative to renaming all your files though. You set your server to parse your .html files as server side documents through your web hosting control panel.
-----SIDE BAR-----

To keep things organized, you can create a directory at the root level called "includes" to house all of your included files. Now create a HTML document with only your copyright and navigation links. Copy everything that is between the BODY tags of this document and paste it in a new file. Save this file as nav.html or any name you like with extension .htm or .html. You need not save this file with .shtml extension. Now upload this file to your "include" directory which you created for housing SSI Includes. To include copyright info and navigation links in a HTML document in your SITE ROOT, place the following code where you want the copyright info to be seen:

<!--#include virtual="/includes/nav.html" -->
Now if you want to include copyright info and navigation links in a HTML document in a folder UNDER your site root, the code will change to:
<!--#include virtual="../includes/nav.html" -->
...and so on.

If you want to change or edit your copyright info or navigation links, just edit and upload your nav.html file and the change will be reflected in all the documents (using the "Include code") instantly. You can also create your website headers/footers using SSI Includes. There are host of other cool things you can do with SSI. For more info on SSI, you can visit the following sites:

http://wdvl.com/Authoring/SSI/Intro/index.html
http://www.bignosebird.com/ssi.shtml

All the best!

Vishal

[Jason Gazaway]

Hey Vishal

I tried it and it worked like a charm!

This is one excellant thing to know.. Sheesh.. I really wish I would have known about this a LONG time ago.. It would have saved me alot of time changing things over, and such..

Thanks again

Warmest Regards,
Jason Gazaway

[TomD]

Hello Vishal.

Helpful information, Thank you. This remindes me of a question I keep forgetting to ask. If you keep your pages text and meta tags as they are but make changes like SSI�s or converting to ASP pages what happens to the old ranking you established on the engines. Will you end up starting from scratch because of the new file extensions.

And if you can do this on your server as you stated:

�There is alternative to renaming all your files though. You set your server to parse your .html files as server side documents through your web hosting control panel.�

Would the engines see the final htm product or htm with tags for the includes.

Thanks in advance,
Tom D.

[Vishal P. Rao]

Hi Tom,

Welcome to the forum

[Gobala Krishnan]

Hi Vishal / Jason,

I tried it out too and it worked superbly. I had to banf my head against my PC for doing things the hard and messy way.

Do you also name your index page as index.shtml?

I tried on my mine, but what happens is that i get an error when I just type mydomain.com in the browser. I have to type mydomain.com/index.shtml to see anything..

[Jason Gazaway]

Hey Gobala

Yes, you will need to change your index.html/htm to index.shtml .. But this only eeds to be done if you used an SSI code on your index page

Warmest Regards,
Jason Gazaway

[Vishal P. Rao]

Hi Gobala,

You need to edit the http.conf file in your server or just tell your web hosting guys about the problem. They'll be able to handle it. Here's a discussion about similar problem:

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Web/Web_Servers/Apache/Q_20319588.html

Regards,

Vishal