SSI allows you to reuse a piece of code without having to hand code it into every single page. For example, you can keep a navigation header (or any other repeating element) of your site in a file by itself. When you want to include the header on a page, you simply insert a tiny piece of code to point to it. The web server writes the header into the page each time it loads.

To make a change to the header you only have to change one file. Every page that “includes” the header will reflect the change automatically, saving worlds of time and energy.

This tutorial explains the technical details, and other ways of achieving the same thing with PHP and ASP. All are easy for anyone comfortable with HTML code (I’m a beginner myself). I got a demo working in under 30 minutes.

Figuring this out was an “Ah hah!” moment for me. I knew it was possible, but I had no idea how easy it was. This may be the most important tool I have learned for developing web sites.

Do you have any simple, yet indispensable techniques for web development? Tell us about it, or link to a tutorial in the comments below.

So to deal with the possible future spikes in traffic, I’ve started testing out some ways of optimizing WordPress and the virtual private server I have hosted on RimuHosting.

So far, I’ve installed the Digg Defender and WP-Cache plugins for WordPress. Digg Defender sees traffic from digg.com and redirects it to an external cached version of the page on a free service called Coral Cache. Ricardo Galli, author of WP-Cache, describes his plugin as:

An extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database.

Installation of the two plugins were pretty easy and I’m now looking into optimizing the server itself. I found this link:

Streamlining your webserver

The instructions are for Gentoo Linux, but it looks fairly adaptable to my installation Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I know, I know, nerd alert! I’m still a newbie to managing a web server, so I won’t pretend to know the best way to do this. At this point, it’s gonna be trying out new things and seeing if it works.

If gracious readers have any further advice, feel free to offer suggestions in the comments. Feedback, both negative and positive, are always welcomed.