Includes are simply not working

[Webbie2]

I have been tearing my hair out trying to get includes files to work. I use the syntax <!--#include virtual="/includes/name-of-include.shtml" --> It simply DOES NOT WORK. I can see the code on the uploaded page, but nothing is pulled in to show. You can see two examples at http://www.californiarendezvous.com/...a-del-mar.html . One is just above <h1> and one is at the bottom of the text column. The top one is an ad, the bottom is a table with images and text. I have also noticed that my Includes files have become corrupted. Here is a link from one of them: <a href="%20../romantic-picnic-ideas.html"> . (I fixed the above-noted includes before re-loading.) I don't know if the two issues are related, but it is suspicious. My gut feeling is that the very first Help person who "helped" ("J") did not help, but rather messed up the File Manager. I have been having recurring problems that absolutely stop me in my tracks for hours at a time. This is not normal. I tried submitting a Help ticket and got no response at all. Honestly, the only reason I am still here is because a colleague whose opinion I value tells me that HG is the best on the planet.

[bcaa8ra]

You have to make sure the files have executable attributes.

[EarlyOut]

You might also find that you have to give the calling page a .shtml extension, like:

5-crowns-corona-del-mar.shtml

[Webbie2]

The files worked just fine on another host, so I have to believe they are executable.

Thanks, Early Out, but I cannot imagine that a host as big as HG would force me to change every single page to an shtml page, and then create hundreds of redirects. That doesn't sound real. My gut is still telling me there is something wrong in the initial setup.

[EarlyOut]

Why not just try my suggestion? It's not really a philosophical question, after all!

[EarlyOut]

Some light reading:

http://support.hostgator.com/article...-side-includes

There's a way to avoid it, but it's not recommended because of the processing overhead it generates:

http://support.hostgator.com/article...ng-html-as-php

[buzznet]

I've been using includes on my .shtml pages for years and in the past couple of weeks all of the executable (php and cgi) included files stopped working. Now in place of the data formally returned by the php or cgi, I get [an error occurred while processing this directive]. My work-around for those pages that were pulling php files was to use php includes and convert the shtml page to a php page. However, I have no solution for the pages that use includes to pull in cgi. I am very surprised I can't find any reports of similar problems since this would appear to be a server-wide behavior change and includes are such a common practice.