A must read for non-experts making their own websites

I’ve been making my own little websites for a little while now - www.jonksbargains.com; www.matnewton.com/mongolia and my most famous website (for a couple of days I was all over the news in Australia) www.savethemexicanwave.com.

The Mongolia one is my most recent and I’m highly cheesed that I didn’t make this discovery sooner.  Have you ever made a website only to notice a little error which requires you to go through 20 pages just to fix the same thing? I have. In the case of the Mongolia website, this happened maybe five or six times. Why couldn’t I just drag all the repeated code from the same file, I asked myself as I sobbed into my beer. (Ignore that last bit.)

Well today I found you actually can do this. It’s called Server Side Includes, one of the greatest inventions in the history of HTML.  A search for Includes HTML on Google will yield page after helpful page saving you hours and hours of time.

You can store HTML in a single file which can be accessed every time a new page is opened. I really, really wish I knew about this a week ago.