[…] I decided to create something a little bit more complex, that will allow me to grow and expand my home page much more easily. Besides, I am firm believer that you can’t really design a good looking web page without using includes. It just doesn’t work. So even when when I have no server side includes I cheat and use Javascript to simulate them. […]

@Tino – thanks for bringing up m4 Tino! I never used it, but it does seem like a more “accessible” way of doing this stuff. Then again, maintenance seems like a pain in the ass due to the fact you need to “re-compile” the thing. It’s an interesting alternative.

@Gamberoni – well, I wasn’t really interested in menus. I wanted to have a page template with a header (with all the css, and javascript links), footer and a sidebar that would be in one place where they could be edited easily. In most server side languages you can do something like this when you create a new page:

< ?php include "header.php"; ?>
< ?php include "sidebar.php";?>