Forum Moderators: phranque
last autumn, we redesigned completely our site. wanting to reduce the site maintenance (mostly my job) on a site with 1000 odd pages (each in three languages) i clued up on SSI. guess where? (here of course ;-)
i then proceeded to build in varios side navbars, headers and footers using ssi. great stuff - we have actually had to make several site wide changes to these in the first few months online with the new design, and i was very pleased at being able to implement these within a matter of minutes, in all languages!
the second part to this story is that we (like most of the world) are heavily reliant on google for traffic. we have just upgraded servers and in the process of that i (again here) clued up on googlbots, dns changes, etc.
i found google guy's post about 'If Modified Since' [webmasterworld.com], followed some of the links in it, and read up on web caching.
testing our site using web-caching.com [web-caching.com], i suddenly realised that our site was NOT cacheable.
this wasn't really apparent to me on a broadband connection, but the SSI includes were preventing the cache in my browser from being used efficiently.
i investigated xbithack, but got completely turned off at having to constantly chmod every new page i or others upload. so in a fit of peak, i searched and replaced every SSI include in the site with the html code it included.....
...and Lo and BEHOLD.... our site is now so quick it hurts. unbelievable. all the graphics are displayed instantly on the screen, whilst pages which haven't been modified come up in a flash.
we already have a good average page view of 7, but i just bet this goes up now. we also have lots of repeat visitors, so they are going to love this. i feel like i have just doubled the usability of our site.
** the moral of this story is: **
be fully aware of what SSI can do for the cacheability of your site. is the ease of use worth it?
>>is the ease of use worth it?
I like to do all things offline that can be done offline. That is why I never really understood the need for SSI just for adding headers, navigation and footers.
But that is probably just me being a coding guy liking an offline coding approach. Still static content may as well be static.
Andreas
i feel like i have just doubled the usability of our siteUnfortunately, this is only going to be the case if most of your visitors are using broadband connections. I doubt that most dial up users will see much difference.
jamie,
I have used the xbithack full method for many years with good results. If you upload a brand-new page, you must remember to chmod the file priveleges to 644 to enable xbithack full. However, once you've done that, these priveleges will usually "stick" until you explicitly change them again, no matter how many times you update that file. The only trouble comes in if you delete a resource, and then re-upload it; In this case, you do have to remember to chmod it again.
I use a formal procedure - a checklist - when uploading new stuff and testing it, and the trouble I've had from forgetting to set the file priveleges for xbithack full has been minimal. So, it is possible to have the best of both worlds if you want to. My 2 cents... :)
Good topic! - I wonder how many members here explicitly control the cacheability of resources on their sites, as opposed to webmasters in general, where I've observed the number of cache-aware sites to be low overall.
Jim
jdmorgan - nice to hear from a real life xbithack experience. i think it might have been possible, but i am not the only one who uploads, but would have been the only one chmodding, so for the moment, that is one less thing for me to think about. will remember for future though and might well use it now for certain folders, etc. cheers
