Not that you’ll notice any difference, but I’m now using server-side includes to serve up several semi-static pieces of each page of this site, including the logo, the copyright notice, the footer, the CSS declaration, and most importantly, the blogroll. The server overhead is minimal (I get less than 2000 hits a day), and it means I can change my blogroll or my CSS declarations without republishing my entire site. (Note I’m talking about the CSS declarations, the @import statements in the HEAD tag. The actual CSS style definitions were already stored in separate files.)
If you’re hosted on Apache and your hosting provider has set up AllowOverride All (or at least AllowOverride FileInfo) for your virtual host, you can set this up too. Create a file in the root of your web directory called .htaccess and put this line in it:
AddHandler server-parsed .html
Then in your template, you can include a line like this:
<!–#include virtual=”/include/blogroll.html” –>
This will include the contents of the file blogroll.html in your include directory within your public web directory. (You could choose another directory if you like.) Note this inclusion happens at the time the page is requested, not the time the page is published. Which is why I can change my blogroll at any time, and that change will immediately be visible on every page on my site without republishing. Think of it as “just enough” server-side CMS.
You should be aware of the implications of using server-side includes this way. This will require additional overhead for every single HTML page on your site, because you’re telling Apache that every .html file should be treated as if it had server-side includes in it, even if it doesn’t. It’s not a lot of overhead (server-side includes are highly optimized), but it’s not nothing. This is acceptable in my case, since the vast majority of the pages on my site do contain server-side includes (the home page plus all the archives include the blogroll, for instance).
Also, I had backward compatibility issues; many people have linked to my archives at YYYY/MM/DD.html, so I have to keep the .html extension. If you only have a few pages where you’ll use server-side includes, you should use a different file extension for them (the default is .shtml) and only set up those files to be server-parsed.
