The display of this page will be distorted, but it works fine when constrained by first cell/column on each site page.

I'm also using ybotnav.html for text links and contact info at bottom of each page. Anything repeated on most or all pages can be handled in this way.

Finally Getting To It

I continued to avoid chore for many months. And when I did get to it, hours disappeared quickly, for by then I had more pages.

But hey, I do love it. And there's good news besides. Those notes regards slowing page downloads (they're still around), appear to have applied in an earlier time when servers were slower. I haven't detected any increase in download time for pages on my site.

Get to this right now, before your site grows even larger. Whatever time it takes will be saved many times over on future changes required.

Test First

Before getting carried away, be sure to test to see that whatever code you choose works properly on your host server. If it does not, and your host can't help you, then you may be stuck with renaming page name extensions to .SHTML. Which also means changing links internal to your site. And losing any links to your site. (Even this option isn't available on all hosts.)

An Alternative

Here is another include command I am not using on my site. It assumes all files to be included are in /includes/, a subdirectory within directory containing your pages.

Since my site layout is simple, and includes only three subdirectories for pages, I simply uploaded files to be included to these three directories, and to root directory. For me, this is a great solution for it takes only minutes to upload four copies. You might do better, however, with above.

Further Resources

What triggered me into action was Jennifer Johnson's article, "How To Avoid Website Growing Pains." She's been trying to talk me into using SSI for years. I should have listened to her and got to it sooner. (And so should you!) Here's a link to her article.

Here's a page from Webopedia given a search on SSI. Lots of great info referenced here. Follow link to Yahoo for a couple more. As a reminder, that bit about slowing download speed is included in one of referenced articles. I'd ignore this, for I found no degradation at all.

Wrapping Up

I should have done this years ago. Do it now. Or you'll be saying same thing in a year or so. Honest, you will!

Anyway, there is another program called ForgeIcon - try to find it on Google. If you don't want to download any program, go to http://www.favicon.com. They have an online software to help you make icon.

Use your artistic genius to make icon, and name it as "favicon.ico". All icon files have extension .ICO (but of course).

UPLOADING IT

You need to upload icon on your server if you really want it be visible to your visitors. For that you need an FTP program. I use CuteFTP that you can probably get at http://www.cnet.com or some other free download site.

Some simple folks also use good old browser to upload a file by simply typing FTP path in location bar. In case of browser, you just have to copy-paste file, that is, if you have login and password.

Then, save favicon file in folder where you want it to appear. For example, if you want it to appear with http://www.maindomain.com then you save favicon file in root folder of your server, that is, it's path should be http://www.maindomain.com/favicon.ico. But, if you want a different icon to appear with http://www.maindomain.com/subdomain/anotherfile.html, you need to store new icon (with same name - favicon.ico) in folder "subdomain", that is, path of second icon file should be http://www.maindomain.com/subdomain/favicon.ico.

After this, whenever your web site is accessed, icon shows up, and it remains there when site is book-marked or added to Shortcuts section of browser.

So this is how you can create and use your own icons on your web sites.