Maintain Your Site with Page Include Files
by Larry (Momp) Poch

We all know how web sites seem to take on a life of their own.
As the number of pages increases maintaining the site can be a
time consuming task...!

The use of "Page Include" files makes the task of editing web
pages a lot easier and faster. An additional benefit is that
it reduces the size of a page, thus improving page load time.
This article takes a brief look at three forms of "Page Include"
files. CSS Includes, SSI Includes, and Javascript Includes.

1.. (CSS) Cascading Style Sheet Includes

CSS can be used to format the page margins, font, link colors,
and much more. Create a file in your text editor, and include
all the common stylesheet declarations for your pages, now save
the page with a .css file extension.

Note: the declaration tags
are not included in an external style sheet. This reference is
in the Link Relevant tag used to call up the stylesheet.

For this example we will call the stylesheet page "main.css".

h1 {color: #ff0000; font-family: arial; font-size: 14px;
text-decoration : underline; }
p {font-family: verdana; font-size: 10pt; color: #ffffff; }
td {font-family: verdana; font-size: 10pt; color: #ffffff; }
a {font-family: arial; font-size: 10pt; font-weight: bold; }
a:link {color: #0000ff; text-decoration: none; }
a:visited {color: #800080; text-decoration: none; }
a.menu:link {color: #ffffff; text-decoration: none; }
a:hover {color: gold; text-decoration: underline; }

In the tag area of the page the "main.css" stylesheet
is called up using the LINK REL tag.


Now when you want to add or change your page format, just edit
this one file. The changes will appear on any page where the
stylesheet is called up.

For more on CSS see:
http://www.mompswebdesign.com/css/index.html

AOL Users Click Here

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2.. (SSI) Server Side Includes

SSI is a great way of controlling site content that appears
on multiple pages across a web site.

Requirements:
1..your web site server must have SSI enabled.
2..most web hosts require the SSI pages to have a file
extension of .shtml in place of .html or .htm
3..the file extension used will depend on the operating
system used on the web hosts server.

Windows servers use .asp file extension.
Windows script:

Unix/Linux servers use .php file extension.
Unix/Linux script:

This example will build a navigation bar for the bottom of a
page. My web host server is Linux so we will use the .php file
extension.

Create a file in your text editor and include the HTML code for
the navigation bar. Now save the SSI page with a .php file
extension. Any HTML coding can be used in a SSI file, but the
file should only include the code for the specific item.
We will name this file "bot_nav.php" and place it in a sub-directory
called "ssi"


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