10/21/2004

Using SSI to include cool stuff

I was playing with my account at my ISP and I figured out that you can plug into the blogger system pretty much any content that I want by adding in a server side include into the template. In theory this could provide anything into the blog including dynamic content using a server side include with a CGI script or static content. It also means that you can build a separate file (or have a database do it for you) and then have that information attached to your blog.

Here were the basics. I created a file called nowreading.html that included an Amazon.com referral link. The basic content of it is arbitrary.

I then added a reference to it using the server side include command #include.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

I had to put a .htaccess file into the directory that looks like this.

AddOutputFilter Includes html
Options +Includes

This text is probably different depending on the server you deploy. The result is that the text is included into the blog where I added it to the template. Using this technique I can update one file and include a new feature in my blog throughout every entry where it appears. This requires having your own server and a server that can do server side includes but it is a great door to enter things into the blog that would otherwise be impossible to do using the standard tools in Blogger.