Automatic Update On HTML Pages

[ilusion]

Hello,

I'm new to this forum. Sorry if this post is under the wrong category. I'm working on a site for my company. Its a relatively basic site with company info, etc.

We have a "news column" on each of the pages (7 pages total). Here is my problem, whenever we have to add the latest news I have to go into each individual page and add in the new information.

So, how can I make this an automated process? Where I would only have to add the new info once and each of the pages will update automatically. I'm assuming its something outside of the HTML. This would save me so much time and effort.

Thanks in advance!

[drhowarddrfine]

I'm heading out the door, and can give an example later, but what you might want is a "server side include" (SSI). Your site may not be big enough to be worth consider a "content management system" (CMS).

[jhardman]

I'm heading out the door, and can give an example later, but what you might want is a "server side include" (SSI). Your site may not be big enough to be worth consider a "content management system" (CMS).

I agree with Larry and Curly. Go for a SSI. Basically this means that each page includes a line like this: [html]<!-- #include virtual="/news.inc" -->[/html] and the "news.inc" page is just a brief file including the news of the day. It will just be pasted into the HTML page pulled up, so code appropriately.

the only thing you need to do to make this work is make sure includes are activated on your server. I believe the default file extension for html pages that have SSI is ".shtml". It is possible that this is already turned on on your server and changing the file extension will make it work. It is also more than likely that you can make your server check for includes on any html page regardless of extension, but this will make the server run slower, so I advise against it. Let me know if this helps.

Jared

[ilusion]

Thanks for the quick responses guys!

Well, I've looked into "SSI" and I'm pretty sure it will work for what I need to do. I've already tested my server, SSI is enabled, (to test this I put <!--#echo var="DATE_LOCAL"--> into the code of one of my pages, saved it as .SHTML and the current time and date showed up).

Using this line <!--#include virtual="myfile.txt" --> I should be able to create a News file and have it load up on each page. This will also be helpful in many many other ways like, nav bars, footers, ads, etc. Great... now i'm all excited over SSI.

I'll let you guys know how it turns out.

Thanks again!