Loading news from a text file

[MercuryLime]

Hi, I'm new to dreamweaver and I'm wondering how I could somehow link a news
section of my website to an external text file, so all I would have to do is
update the text file when I wanted to update the news, instead of updating the
whole .html file.

(I mean link, not as in an actual link, but to have the news show up on the
main page FROM the text file).

Thanks,
- Patrick

[MrBonk]

Use your text file as an include file.

[MercuryLime]

Ok, I included it, how do I make it display the text from the file now?

[MrBonk]

All you need to do is to put the include statement wherever you want the
content to appear on your page.

So, for eg. if you have a layer that you want the text file contents to appear
in, you would do something like:

<div id="NewsLayer" style="position:absolute; left:73px; top:70px;
width:172px; height:176px; z-index:1">
<!--#include file="text_file.txt" -->
</div>

[MercuryLime]

Do I need to save it as .shtml when I do that, or does it work as normal .html?

[MrBonk]

Depends on your server setup. Some servers are set to only look for includes
in files with particular extensions.....some look for them in all files
(slower, so less common). You'll need to check with your host.

[MercuryLime]

Alright, I got it working. Thanks.