Hi all,

I'm a relative newbie to web development. I know my HTML and CSS, and am getting involved with Ruby on Rails for some other projects, which has been daunting but very rewarding.

Basically I'm wondering if there's a language/backbone/program/solution to eliminate the copypasta trivialities of HTML, with some caveats. Currently my website is hosted on a school server and unfortunately can't use Rails. Being a newbie I also don't really know what other technologies are available to me (or even what those technologies might be). I'm essentially looking for a way to auto-insert all of my header/sidebar/footer/menu information, and when those need to be updated, the rest of the pages get updated. Right now, I have a sidebar that is a tree of all of the pages on my website. When I add a page, not only do I need to update the sidebar, I have to update it for every page in my domain. This is really inefficient and I'm wondering if there is a better way.

I imagine this is a pretty widespread problem, but searching Google turns up too many irrelevant links (design template websites, tutorials, etc.). I'd appreciate any help.

Oh, and I've heard of HAML as a way to render HTML; how would it be used in this situation?