Making a Plain Website
Posted by Joe Topjian on September 12, 2009 under Development | 
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Introduction
For the past few years, Unix Mages was running on WordPress. The site has not changed in over two years as I was no longer writing content for it. So instead of leaving a stale and possibly insecure WordPress installation on the web, I decided to turn it into an old fashioned static website.
Table of Contents
What I Used
I enjoy using Coda as an editor due to its excellent remote functionality. I started creating a simple website consisting of two files: index.html and style.css.
I soon became tired of trying to lay out all of the elements manually, so I decided to include Blueprint.
Once I started working on the other pages, I realized copying and pasting text was severely inefficient if any future changes needed made. So I broke the pages up into a body, header, and footer and glued everything together using Apache SSI.
Enabling mod_include for Ubuntu 8.04
Apache mod_include is turned off by default. To enable it, simply do:
$ a2enmod include
A few configuration changes needed made in order to get SSI to work:
<Directory /path/to/document/root>
Options +Includes
AddOutputFilter INCLUDES .html
</Directory>
I’m now able to include my header.html and footer.html files in any webpage by using:
<!--#include virtual="/header.html" -->
Conclusion
Today it seems the standard way to create a website is to install WordPress, Drupal, or any other type of Blogging or CMS engine — even if the site will only have a few static pages. I thought it was an excellent practice, if not only for nostalgic reasons, to detail how to create a simple, old fashioned website.
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