Introduction
I don't update my own webpage frequently enough nor do I have sufficient dynamic content to warrant the bother of writing everything as a CGI or PHP script, but there are two common components I'd like to pull in as needed: the footer, with timestamp and standards-conformance declaration, and a navigation bar of some kind. Server-side includes (SSI) are supported by my hosting provider, and were invented for just such a purpose, so I decided to use them.
The footer, being a static element, offers few obstacles, but try as I might I couldn't find a prepackaged solution for adding breadcrumb navigation (my chosen style) via SSI. So I invented one; a skanky little hack that still does the trick.
How Does It Work?
My scheme is predicated on the use of a <meta> tag and two scripts. In the header of each page that is to leave a trail, one puts something like the following:
<meta name="crumb" content="Differential Widgets"/>
One also puts an SSI #include similar to the following in one's page at the place where the trail is to be generated:
<!--#include virtual="/path/to/breadcrumb.cgi"-->
One then executes the following:
crumbcache.py <website-root>
crumbcache.py generates a DBM file that maps URIs to breadcrumb names; the breadcrumb.cgi script fetches names as necessary out of that DBM file and generates the links that make up the breadcrumb trail.
breadcrumb.cgi wraps its breadcrumb trail in a <div> with an id attribute of "crumbs". You can format your breadcrumb trail by adding a rule to your CSS for said <div>.
Where Do I Get It?
The breadcrumb scripts are written in Python, so you will need the Python interpreter installed to use them. They should work with version 2.2 and higher.
Bugs/Needed Enhancements
- Imports dbm rather than anydbm; this should be corrected for proper portability.
- The base-URI component should be specified through a command-line option rather than through the baseUri variable in crumbcache.py.