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SSI is still useful today in Apache/Nginx when you're developing very large complex static sites: you can factor out the parts of your HTML template which chang
by gwern 3y ago
SSI is still useful today in Apache/Nginx when you're developing very large complex static sites: you can factor out the parts of your HTML template which change often, like anything to do with CSS/JS, and upload them separately. (The SSI can be seen as a very simple static site generator which happens to run in the web server.)
SSI worked well enough that I doubt that header/footers were blog's killer app. As I recall, what really made blog software compelling was the commenting system for regular discussion of chronological posts. The 'flat' homepage didn't work too well with lots of small chronological squibs, and the 'guestbook' functionality didn't work well at all.
When you reorganized a homepage to sort pages chronologically by date and have guestbooks on each one... you have a blog.
- p4bl0 3y agoIn addition to comments, I would also add trackbacks [1], and RSS feeds. Trackbacks are mostly dead now, even more than RSS feeds. But back when it was a thing, I found it quite awesome and it's a feature that I always implemented in my homemade blog engines. This was the only time we had an actually decentralized social network, even if it wasn't called that at the time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackback
- gwern 3y ago(Yes, all useful but elicited by the success of blogs - you don't need trackbacks or RSS feeds until there's a large enough number of blogs linking each other & updating regularly that it's worth such infrastructure. So not reasons for the original success.)