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Comments on Reusing HTML without rewriting it
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Reusing HTML without rewriting it
I have a site hosted through GitHub and I'm using footers for special links and it also serves as my main navigation bar for now. I find it a little frustrating to manually copy-paste the footer's contents and I could end up having footers different from one site to another with me missing a page or two to edit.
I'm aware of scripting languages, so that may be the way for me to continue, but with my lack of understanding of those languages, what can I do to automatically output something on every page of a site?
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Use a static site generator. There are other possibilities, but they seem more complicated or worse for your use case.
A static site generator takes in source data in some combination of markup formats (commonly including raw HTML and Markdown) and generates complete HTML pages from that. A key feature of these tools is support for templates which can capture the common structure of related types of pages. These tools usually offer additional features, e.g. they may be able to generate navigation bars, tables of contents, and RSS/Atom feeds.
There are two basic ways to go about this. First, you can choose your own static site generator, run it locally, and simply commit the resulting generated HTML to GitHub. This is exactly what I do for my GitHub Pages hosted site using Hakyll as the static site generator. The benefit of this approach is that you don't need any special support from your hosting provider - so if you decide to host your site somewhere else, you just need to upload the generated HTML somewhere else.
The second way, which is probably better in your situation, is to use the static site generator built in to GitHub Pages. In particular, GitHub Pages supports Jekyll, a popular Ruby-based static site generator. For your specific purpose, you'd probably want to use the layouts and/or includes feature. This way, you don't need to set up Jekyll yourself (though you will probably want to), and the history of your GitHub repository will reflect the actual meaningful changes you make and not a bunch of generated noise.
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