Summary
In this Tutorial, you got your first usable Webmaster tool. SSIs can make your job as a Webmaster much easier. No more cutting and pasting of your signature file into all the different Web pages that you have to create and maintain.
SSIs are the first step to creating dynamic documents, and they require almost no programming knowledge. With SSIs, you can include the current date, print the date when your Web page was last modified, execute system commands, and access any CGI program you normally could run through other means.
SSI commands are made available on your server through a configuration file called srm.conf. Two commands in the srm.conf file enable the SSI commands. The Options Include directive actually enables the operation of SSIs. The
AddType text/x-server-parsed-html .shtml
tells the server what types of files to parse for SSI commands.
SSIs, in my opinion, create no more risk for your server than CGI programs. So if your server allows CGI programs, it should allow SSIs. However, the fact that each SSI file requires parsing is a legitimate concern of your server’s System Administrator. If your server is underpowered and overworked, one way to get a little relief is to turn off SSIs. Most sites don’t suffer that much from the extra burden of parsing SSIs and therefore allow their users the advantages that SSIs offer.
