Server Side Includes
 

Just curious if anyone uses and how they use SSI's in free sites. Been thinking of ways to cut down on the build time of them and was thinking that using SSI's for standard stuff would help.

A well organized collection of templates will reduce build time dramatically and keep your server happy with less stuff to process on every page load.

IMO, dynamic elements (SSI) should only be used for things you may need to change in the future, if at all. Stuff like meta-content rating, or 2257 footer info seems appropriate to me.

I use ssi for my niche recips. I have 5 files per niche, each with 20 LL's on it. So, basically when I go to insert my recips, instead of hunting them all down or whatnot... I will insert my ssi call to load my text file. (ex: babes01.txt)

You can look at a page I built back in 2004 and get an idea of how you might be able to use the system. I do not update the recips on that site, so do not use them unless you want to use 3 year old recips. :D

May not be for you, but it works well for me. :)

Yeah, my problem with includes for recip table is that I keep changing mine. If I wanted to change the table even with one recip, it would affect previously submitted FS (obviously, a big no-no resulting in recips to LL to which the site was submitted being taken off).

That's no biggie. Here's what I do. I have a recip table called lesbians01.txt. If I need to take off a recip and add a different one, make a copy of lesbians01.txt and name it lesbians01-1.txt. The original stays as is but you just made a new table with the new recip in it. On a few of mine I'm up to 01-5. :)

I use php includes myself, real easy. Plus can be made to look just like it's all html. I even use to, use them for avs sites, included the code/sales block, just change the site id. Same for mirrored free sites. Most every host has php.

I use both SSI's and php.

If you plan to have high traffic to your sites, you might want to check out SSI performance issues. SSI puts additional load on web servers.