In this article we will look at what SSI is, why it makes life so easy, and exactly how to set up SSI on your website…and then I’ll share two little bonus tricks I’ve discovered.

What is SSI?

SSI actually covers a number of features to improve your website. I am going to speak here of just one critical improvement, referred to as an “include” file.

Essentially, an “include” file is a separate file that your web page can include as if it was part of the page file. Let’s take a real-life example. The Liquid Vitamin Supplements Store uses SSI in a number of places.

If you are used to using FrontPage or have recently learned HTML, you probably assume that every web page is a single html file. The example above is actually five files. There is the main HTML file for the page. There is a style sheet (CSS) and there are three SSI “include” files — one for the left navigation menu and two for the two navigation menus across the bottom. I could have, perhaps even should have, used more “include” files, but you can be the judge when you’ve finished reading this article.

Why use SSI?

SSI makes it easy to bring changes to your website. There are some changes you will need to make to every page or to every page in a specific section. Your website might start out with just 10 pages, and you might figure that it is no big deal to cut-and-paste a change to the navigation menu 10 times. But each time you add a page, you have to update that menu. And with each new page added, you have to paste one more time. When you reach 50 pages (Never thought your website would grow that big? You’re not alone.) it becomes very tedious to update.

For instance, when I wanted to add the website monitoring logo and the link to the navigation menu at my personal growth website, I had to change just one file, and — presto! — the change appeared on every page of the site bearing that navigation menu. It was so very much easier than past updates before I began using SSI.

There are two other benefits to SSI “include” files. Because a single line of code replaces what might have been several dozen in each HTML file, your files are much smaller, taking less space on your server. And, because the “include” file has already been loaded with the first page a visitor sees, the next page is much quicker for visitors to load.

How to set up SSI?

You need three things to set up SSI.

1. Configure your server for SSI
2. Set up your “include” file
3. Call up your “include” file into your web page HTML file

First, you need your server configured for SSI. Ask your web host if this has already been done. Also ask if it has been set up to parse .html extensions to read SSI.

If your server has been set up for SSI, you are one step closer. If it has also been set up to parse .html extensions to read SSI, you are two steps closer.

Not all hosts support SSI, but most do. If yours does, but it has not been set up for your account, look for the .htaccess file in your root directory (where your index.html or home page file is stored). In my experience, this is not usually viewable using an FTP process; you have to find it through your control panel.

The .htaccess file is a text file. If you do not already have an .htaccess file on your server, you can create one in NotePad or even in Word (just save it with a .txt extension), but whatever you do, make sure not to write over a .htaccess file already on your server. If it is already there, just add the following lines to the file, being careful not to erase anything that is already there:

AddType text/html .shtml
AddHandler server-parsed .shtml
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes

So far, so good. But this will recognize only .shtml files for includes, and you probably don’t want to change the .html extensions to .shtml on all your pages, if for no other reason because it will mess up all your inbound links to those pages.

So add this line. In theory, it should be the second line, but careless me has gotten it to work at the end, too:

AddHandler server-parsed .html

Save the edited .htaccess file to the root directory of your server.

As an aside, there are several ways to configure your server for SSI. This one has worked for me across several hosts.

So much for the techie stuff, now you need the second element: the “include” file itself. Suppose your “include” file is the navigation menu. You don’t need “head” and “title” and “body” tags. Just type in your text and code just the way it would appear in your webpage. It’s that simple. Save it as an HTML file, and load it to your route directory or to its own directory.

All you need now, is to call up your navigation menu in each file you want it to appear in. To do this, a simple line suffices where a whole column of code and text once stood.

Here is the line to place in your code:

This assumes that nav1.html is the name of the “include” file and that it is in the same directory as the page it is being inserted into. If you place the file into a directory called “nav”, you would have to include code like this in your web page file:

That’s all you really need to know. But here are a couple bonus tricks that will make SSI “includes” work even better for you.

Bonus SSI Tip #1

You don’t need to stuff everything into a single SSI file. What if some elements you want on some pages and others not? Let me offer two examples of situations that call for splitting the SSI “include” file in two.

The first is on my vitamin site. Return to The Liquid Vitamin Supplements Store and look at the links across the bottom. The first row is typical website stuff: contact, privacy, etc., which one wants access to from every page of the site. The second is the links directory, which a webmaster does not typically want linked from every page. For example, see the bottom of this article on calcium and dieting. The row of links directory is not there.

The second example is this free mediation class sign-up page. Notice again that there are two different navigation consoles. The first is generic to the site, the second is specific to that section of the site. So a second SSI “include” file, using just one additional line of code, can provide interlinking for the section, without affecting other sections of the website. This is very handy for large sites.

Bonus SSI Tip #2

You can also use an SSI “include” file to hide some of your source code. I will show you a ridiculously simple way to do this.

There are at least two legitimate reasons why somebody might want to hide parts of their code. The most obvious would be if you are running a proprietary script. The second is if you are running a script that displays content, but shows up as a script in the source code. This was my challenge.

At the bottom of the navigation menu at my personal growth articles page, there is a “Happiness Quote of the Day”. In fact, it is a random quote that reloads when the page reloads. I had included the random-text script in the SSI “include” file, but the search engines were seeing the script in the source code, not the text that human visitors were seeing. So I placed the script in its own “include” file, which I inserted like this into the main “include” file:

Now the search engines see the same things as humans see. Why would I care? Search engines visit more frequently pages that change more frequently. That does not mean the site will rank higher, unless frequent change is part of the search engine’s ranking algorithm, but it does mean that other changes will be indexed faster.

To sum up, SSI “includes” can save you time and headaches when changes need to be made to your site, plus they reduce the file size and increase the loading time of your pages. Once you’ve set up the server to read SSI, all you need to do is create an “include” file and call it up in your web page using one line of code.

I can hardly believe I wasted so much time cutting and pasting before I learned about SSI. You won’t believe it either!

Open Access material is readily provided to help further research, assist teaching, and to aid many other academic purposes. Open Access eliminates subscriptions and fees and most copyright and licensing restrictions. This movement for open access via the internet is extremely beneficial for the future of not only academic science writing but for other research fields as well. The ability for authors to help other researchers without money in the picture will establish a more accurate approach towards researching in our society today.

Background

The Open Access Movement is the effort to make scholarly research articles free to the public online. According to Public Knowledge, “the OA movement has focused on peer-reviewed journal articles and their preprints.” This is because scholarly journals don’t pay royalties to authors and most of their research is funded by taxpayers. One method for providing open access is self-archiving. Self-archiving is when someone submits a digital document on the web in order to provide open access to it.

Along with the open access movement comes the open source movement. The open source movement is composed of various people who feel the best way to produce sophisticated bug-free software is to bring together skilled programmers who would work for free (Cherian, 2000). The software provides a source code for the user which meets the Open Source Definition, allowing users to change and improve the software. Even though there is some cost involved with open source software, both movements are fairly similar in that they promote free material for users by conveniently making it readily for them to use or amend.

When Paul Ginsparg set up the server ArXiv to make physics preprints freely accessible, the first building block for the Open Access Movement was laid. Other co-founders were Peter Suber and Steven Harnad (www.open-access.net). It has gained momentum from three major statements since 2002: Budapest Open Access Initiative, Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, and Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (Cambridge University Library). The movement has gained many supporters since it has been around. It gives authors a larger audience while giving readers a chance to research material without having to worry about barriers or payment. Libraries support the movement because they want to help raise the school’s research profile, and with open access can better help students find the information they need. The Open Access Movement also helps funding agencies by providing public access to the results of publicly-funded research (Peter Suber, 2004). Even though Open Access allows for a larger audience for authors, the movement can strip the reuse of the published work. This can bring about a possible negative side for opposers to sit with.

Many of the initiatives for Open Access focus on taxpayer funded research. “The campaign usually recognizes exceptions for military research, patentable discovery research, and research that some authors publish in some royalty-producing form” (Suber, 2004).

Impact

According to a study mentioned in an e! Science News article, “when academic articles are “open access” or free online, they get read more often, but they don’t get cited more often in academic literature” (Cornell University, 2008). The reason suggested for this is researchers already have the information they need from other relevant articles readily accessible to them. Researchers conducted a study by making some journal articles free to users while requiring a fee for other articles. They found the free articles were downloaded and read more but weren’t cited more than the subscription based articles. According to Cornell graduate student Phillip Davis, they found that open-access publishing may reach more readers than subscription-access publishing, but there is no evidence that freely accessible articles are cited any more than subscription-access articles (Cornell University, 2008).

Peer review is the screening of a work to consider for publication. Within the topic of Open Access, publishers make various claims that Open Access threatens peer review. “If OA is forced on them they will not be able to survive financially because they will discover that there is no stable long-term business model for OA publishing” (Poynder, 2006). Stevan Harnad makes a good point saying that Open Access is the free availability of peer-reviewed research, not the availability of research free of peer review.

As mentioned earlier, the Open Access Movement can greatly affect universities, libraries, and various funding agencies. The movement reduces the school’s expense on journals and helps them extend their goal to share knowledge and other research. In dealing with libraries, Peter Suber states that the movement for Open Access solves the pricing and permission crisis. The pricing crisis means libraries have to pay sky high prices for journals, while the permission crisis deals with licensing terms prohibiting libraries from accessing electronic journals.

Possibilities

I think the Open Access Movement will greatly affect academic research. Allowing researchers to freely read academic journals will help our world’s growth in knowledge. Sharing each other’s works with certain ideas and stances will allow for additional, maybe even more significant, ideas to form. The movement will help authors get their research out to a larger number of people willing to read about their findings in order to assist their own research. With this movement does come some issues related to authorship rights. The movement will have an affect on individual authorship, priority, and especially ownership. Peter Suber talks about various ways how the movement can maneuver around these negative affects. First, Open Access doesn’t require the author to throw away all of their copyright privileges. They can use one of the Creative Commons licenses or compose their own licenses and attach them to their works (Suber, 2004). “When copyright holders consent to OA they consent in advance to the unrestricted reading, downloading, copying, sharing, storing, printing, searching, linking, and crawling of the full-text of the work” (Suber, 2004).

Conclusion

After conducting my research, I believe the Open Access Movement is a masterfully developed concept that has potential to aid students and professionals with their research and help extend their knowledge of certain sciences. Allowing for academic journals to be available online for everyone to read, disregarding any barriers that previously came with it, would be a significant improvement for our societies research profile. The movement benefits so many professions and institutions such as authors, readers, libraries, universities, and funding agencies. There have been many times when I have been denied access to scholarly articles on the internet because of subscription fees, but without these fees in the future I can develop better research from a wider range of material.

For more information about the author, visit www.watersidemedia.com