external data table

[claudio]

hi everybody,

I posted my message here last time when I was just beginning to build my web site. A few weeks later.....I have some more complicated (for me) question.

My site (html+css) is made up of articles each one containing also an exchange rate table for the main world currencies. The articles are updated almost daily and so is each table. The main web page containes approx. 10 articles and tables. Now the question: is it possible, in order to keep my site as light as possible, to keep the tables elsewhere (they are around 3kb each) but at the same time have them show up at the same time as a visitor checks the site, basically as if they where still in the html code?

I had a look at mysql. It's all doubledutch to me. I'm no programmer and I learn as I go.

Any other idea?
Thanks

[Banfa]

There are many posibilities, however all of them require some sort of server side scripting.

Server side scripting is where you page contains code in a script language that is run at the server before the page is sent to the client.

So you could

1. Put the table into a file that is included at the bottom of every page.

2. Put the information for the table in MySQL, write a server side script that reads the data from MySQL and outputs an HTML table containing it, include that script into all you pages.

And that is just 2 options.

Your first choice is going to have to be what server side script to use, several are available, PHP, Perl, Python to name 3 (all starting with P however this is not a unique feature of Server Side scripts). You can write server side scripts using Microsofts ASP which uses Visual Basic as the scripting language.


Once you have decided on the language then decide on the method, just include a had written file or store the data in a file or database and have a script that extracts it. The first is simpler but the second is better and is detaches the data from the way in which it is displayed making both easier to change in the future.