SSI in Htaccess for ErrorDocuments, DirectoryIndexing, SEO

If you are using WordPress, I’m sure you are using my AskApache Google 404 Plugin, but whatever your error pages may be, using SSI you can make them better. My 404 Error Page is handled by WordPress and PHP, but all of my other error pages (codes 4xx to 5xx) are handled using SSI.

Notice the email note which has the subject prefilled? Thats one of the main uses for SSI, you can add forms to your errordocuments and get notified of problems which mean you can fix them.

Add this to your .htaccess for each ErrorDocument you make.

ErrorDocument 503 /errordocs/503.html

My /errordocs/.htaccess

# turn on symlinks for rewrites and turn off SSI's ability to exec
Options None
Options SymLinksIfOwnerMatch IncludesNOEXEC
 
# makes files ending in .html be filtered through the INCLUDES filter before being sent to client
AddOutputFilter Includes html
 
# this internal apache variable prevents your errordocs from allowing keep-alive connections
SetEnv nokeepalive
 
# used to determine the time and for SSI output
SetEnv TZ America/Indianapolis
SetEnv SERVER_ADMIN webmaster@askapache.com