ssi (or cgi?) problem - help!

[Big Ass Robot]

I'm new to ssi (and cgi and html for that matter), so when i visited a ssi tutorial page, the first thing it said was I needed to make a file called ".htaccess" and put the following 3 lines in it-

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes
AddType application/x-httpd-cgi .cgi
AddType text/x-server-parsed-html .html

So I did that, and uploaded the .htaccess file. Then I made files called "insert.html" and "test.shtml" (with this one having the tag <!--#include virtual="insert.html"--> in it) and uploaded them. It didn't work. What went wrong?

After giving up on the whole ssi thing, I went back and tried to access this cgi thing that I'm working with called Greymatter (a journal-type thing), but I got a 403 Forbidden error "You don't have permission to access /gm.cgi on this server." Did the .htaccess file have anything to do with the forbidden error? How can I access my cgi?

Oh, on another note, the .htaccess file seems to have disappeared - is it supposed to do that?

[lucifer]

.htaccess is a file used by apache web server

are you trying to set up ssi, cgi? most commonly this would be done using httpd.conf by sys admin

. files are hidden which is why you can't see it - look for a view hidden files option on your ftp

.htaccess is used to protect directories so could be giving you the forbidden problems

[Cheap Bastard]

Oh, on another note, the .htaccess file seems to have disappeared - is it supposed to do that?
i had the same problem, but they showed up in telnet.
i guess the hidden option thing should be easier though.