About Includes

Includes are reasonably well covered in the ebook. However, a little more information never hurt anyone, and hopefully if they appeared mysterious before, they will be "plain as mud" afer reading this page.

What Are The SBI Includes?

Have you ever heard of SSI? That stands for server side includes, and is what you would use on an FTP website, that has this option enabled. Well, SBI has their own version, and they are far easier to use.

The concept of them is very easy to grasp - think of them as part of your webpage, but stored on a different file. You can put pretty much anything you like in them...any HTML, images, javascripts etc. The include is given a name such as ***myinclude.shtml*** and that tag is placed on the page where you wish it to appear.

When the browser sees that tag, it knows there is a file to get called myinclude.shtml, and it goes off to get it from the server. It will then put it in the exact place you told it to....where the ***myinclude.shtml*** tag is.

How I Do It

The way recommended in the ebook is how I used to do my includes. I would write them on the page, as I wanted them to appear. I would then cut and paste this into a new blank text file and save it as includename.shtml I recommend putting as many includes as practical on your page.

Header, footer, adblocks, newsletter signup, anything at all you wish to appear on more than one page. In fact, here's a tip. Put a blank include at the top and bottom of each column.
Why?
Think ahead - what will you do in the future when an advertiser offers you a great price to display his/her advert on each page? Well, if you have a blank include in various strategic positions, then you will simply place the ad in one of these includes and reupload.

Note that SBI may not accept a totally blank include...it wants something in it. So use the code for a space.

This has one small drawback....you can't see your includes until the entire page has been uploaded to the SBI server. Of course, if it's not quite right, you will have to redo things and upload again. So now I use Rohits tool, SBI Valet

Easy as anything to use, you simply browse to the page you want to preview, click a button and that's it. You see your page on your own computer, complete with includes. Not much to it huh? Two buttons to click....browse to the file, then select the browser to preview with.

Unfortunately, this works with Windows only, not Macs.So Mac users will have to continue doing it the long way....sorry!