The short answer to your question is, YES, I do offer SSI at tdothost.com

Personally, I always prefer to do it in PHP, since most scripts that I use are written in PHP.

However, Frontpage and Dreamweaver allows you to easily build sites using SSI and many site owners prefer using it.

The problem:

Usually when you test your site on your local machine, it will look good. The reason is that Frontpage and Dreamweaver will handle the SSIs internally.

Later after you publish your site to the hosting servers, it will not work.

The fix:

To fix this issue you will need to add 2 directives to your htaccess file, to tell the server how to read and interpret the includes.

If you are trying to include a page with the extension .shtml, then you will need to add the following to your htaccess file:

AddType text/html .shtml
AddHandler server-parsed .shtml

If your main page ends with a .html extention, then you will need to add the following as well:

AddHandler server-parsed .html

And if you site ends with .htm, then you need to add this instead:

AddHandler server-parsed .htm

Your .htaccess file should reside at the level of you main page and should at the end look as follows:

AddType text/html .shtml
AddHandler server-parsed .shtml
AddHandler server-parsed .html

TdotHost customers can also do XSSIs (eXtended Server-Side Includes).

XSSIs were introduced in Apache versions 1.2 and above.

XSSI will allos you to programmatically add your own variables and conditions to your directives.

A common use of XSSI is to check the type of browser a visitor is using, IE vs Firefox and make conditions based on it.

In general, the advantage of using server side includes over client side logic like Javascript is mainly due to significant performance gains when loading a page.

As always, your questions are most welcome.

Regards.

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