I was having trouble getting SSIs to work on this site. Usually my host is good about stuff like that, but maybe they were having an off week. Unfortunately, I really wanted to include a list of links on my sidebar, but didn't want to hardcode them in as I expect them to change fairly frequently. I needed to find a work-around.

I went looking for a solution on some of the MT sites I'd discovered, but didn't find anything that really satisfied me. I didn't want to set up another blog. SSIs weren't working. I was stumped.

Then I reread parts of the MT manual and saw the answer. Modules. Wow. I was wondering what those things were.

All I had to do was format my two lists (with <ul> and <li>, but no other code). Then I created separate module templates for each list. Finally I put the line

<$MTInclude module="NameOfMyModule"$>

on each of my templates where I wanted a list to appear. And that was it.

Now each time I want to updated a link list, I only have to change the one module and my list will be updated throughout the site.

Cool.