Guest Book for Your Blog

A reader asked how to create a visitor registration. I can only think of 2 thing - a Guestbook and a Shoutbox. There are many sites offering free Guestbooks, but most of them require a script, which is usually remotely-hosted and written in a language such as Perl, PHP, Python or ASP. You should also be aware that this leaves you open to link spam where visitors leave messages for the purpose of leaving a link to their sites.

Anyway, I have installed a Guest Book at Natural Remedies. It is currently at the bottom of the left sidebar and I added a title "Please sign my Guest Book". You can try leaving a message there or just click "View My Guestbook". I used Lycos Tripod's HTML Gear to generate the script for the Guestbook. You got to sign up and then click the link "get gear" at the section "Guest Gear" (see screenshot at beginning of paragraph) to generate your code. In the resulting page, fill in the required details. You can chose it to be open (anyone can just leave a message) or moderate the messages, open in same or new window, filter swear words, allow or disallow HTML, links, , etc, type of button, etc. When you are finished, click "Save and create", highlight the script, copy, and paste into a HTML/Javascript Page Element in the LAYOUT. Drag and drop it to wherever you want it.

As mentioned above, this Questbook will be hosted on another site. If you want things to remain on your site, you will have to install a "Shoutbox". More about that later.