Manic Web Design & Hosting - Server Side Includes

Server side includes

Support for server side includes (SSI) is standard with all web accounts. SSI allows you to "piece together" an HTML file on-the-fly using the various tools below. When used creatively, SSI can enable you to manage and edit your site's "look & feel" by changing only a few files. SSI is NOT compatible with Microsoft FrontPage.

Including other files

You can dynamically include files within your .shtml documents using the following syntax. These files may be static HTML files, static text files, freeCGI programs, or custom CGI programs:




Global variables

The following useful variables are available from within SSI.
For a complete list of variables, please use the

<!--#printenv 
        -->

command.

To place a variable within a .shtml file, use the following code:


Variable	Meaning	Sample
HTTP_REFERER	The page from which the visitor came	http://www.manicdesign.com/support/
HTTP_USER_AGENT	The visitor's browser software	Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)
SERVER_SOFTWARE	The version of the web server	Apache/1.3.6 (Unix)
SERVER_NAME	Your server name	www.manicdesign.com
REMOTE_ADDR	The remote IP address of the visitor	216.244.48.164
REMOTE_USER	The username (in a restricted area)	(none)
QUERY_STRING	Any data following a '?' in the URL
DOCUMENT_NAME	The name of this file	ssi.shtml
DATE_LOCAL	The current date (pacific time)	Tuesday, 12-Sep-2000 12:05:11 PDT
DATE_GMT	The current date (GMT)	Tuesday, 12-Sep-2000 19:05:11 GMT
LAST_MODIFIED	"Last modified" date of the current file	Monday, 18-Jan-1999 22:26:49 PST

File size

You can show the size of the current document within your .shtml file:
 (for size in bytes)


or

 (for size in Kb or Mb)


Timestamps

Using SSI, you can place timestamps within your documents.

First, specify a time format using the variables below:


Then, print out a time using echo (above), i.e.:



Code	Meaning	Sample
%c	The time and date	Tue Sep 12 12:05:11 2000


%R	The time (hh:mm)	12:05
%T	The time (hh:mm:ss)	12:05:11
%r	The time (hh:mm:ss AM)	12:05:11 PM
%H	The hour (24-hour clock, 00-23)	12
%k	The hour (24-hour clock, 0-23)	12
%I	The hour (12-hour clock, 01-12)	12
%l	The hour (12-hour clock, 1-12)	12
%M	The minutes (00-59)	05
%S	The seconds (00-59)	11
%p	AM or PM	PM
%s	The number of seconds since January 1, 1970	968785511
%Z	The time zone	PDT


%D	The date	09/12/00
%a	The abbreviated weekday name (Mon, Tue, ...)	Tue
%A	The full weekday name (Monday, Tuesday, ...)	Tuesday
%w	The weekday number (0-6), 0=Sunday	2
%B	The abbreviated month name (Jan, Feb, ...)	September
%b	The full month name (January, February, ...)	Sep
%m	The month of the year (01-12)	09
%d	The day of the month (01-31)	12
%e	The day of the month (1-31)	12
%y	The 2-digit year	00
%Y	The 4-digit year	2000
%C	The century	20


%j	The day of the year (001-366)	256
%W	The week of the year (00-53) starting Monday	37

Setting variables

You can set variables for use in later echo statements:


You can then print these variables using the following syntax:


Parsing non-SSI file types

Only .shtml files should include SSI tags. In some cases, however, you may wish to have the webserver scan .html files for SSI tags as well. To do so, add the following line to the .htaccess file in your document root:

AddType text/x-server-parsed-html shtml html htm

Where shtml, html, and htm are file types to scan for SSI tags. Use this with caution; on a busy site, this may lead to noticable performance degradation.

XSSI (eXtended Server Side Includes)

Manic uses the Apache webserver which supports the XSSI standard (the embedding of conditional statements within SSI). For more information on XSSI, or for the latest supported SSI enhancements, please visit the Apache webserver SSI documentation.