Sign my guest book?

[Zac Medley]

Does the Bluehost control panel include setting up a guest book? Or do we have to link to some other service for that?

Thanks in advance to anyone who had figured this out.

[redsox9]

Hi, Zac:

If you go to CGI Center from cPanel, there is a cgi script that allows you to add a guest book to your site.

[Zac Medley]

Hey thanks.

I found it in the control panel but there doesn't seem to be much of an explanation. I'll have a play with it, but how does it record the log and how do you view it? That little bit of script doesn't seem to be a whole lot.

Sorry for being such a noob. Other than that I have everything working just the way I want it.

Edit: OK, I think I get it now.

[redsox9]

Hi, Zac:

Glad that you got it to work. I've never used that script but I would have assumed that it's set up the same as any Perl language script would.

FYI, another great guestbook solution can be found at Matt's Script Archive. It's a rather old script (version 2.3.1 - released 29 October 1995) but I remember installing it on a page once a very long time ago and it worked like a charm. Just a suggestion...

http://www.scriptarchive.com/guestbook.html

[Zac Medley]

OK, I was wrong. I have no clue what I'm doing. I copied the script from the simple guestbook section of the CGI center into a page on my site, but all I see is the script, not a guestbook.

All the help seems to assume that I already know what I'm doing - not very helpful.

Edit: Well it is running, and I have been able to check it. What I need now is to figure out how to add some pretty formatting to make it match the rest of my site.

[redsox9]

The way the guest book should work is that you complete a form on a standard HTML page, call to the guestbook.cgi scipt which processes the form, and then have the script direct you to a confirmation page. There should also be another HTML page that the script posts all guestbook entries, but this page may also be part of either the first page or the confirmation page.

[Zac Medley]

The way the guest book should work is that you complete a form on a standard HTML page, call to the guestbook.cgi scipt which processes the form, and then have the script direct you to a confirmation page. There should also be another HTML page that the script posts all guestbook entries, but this page may also be part of either the first page or the confirmation page.

Well, even that sounds too technical for me. I tend to just blunder on through on trial and error and a heavy dose of gestaldt. So far the script is running and I can make, view or edit entries just like I'm supposed to.

This weekend I'll probably putter around some more and figure out how to put it on a decent background.

Thanks for your support. People like you give forums like these a good name.

[redsox9]

Hi, Zac:

I'm glad to have been helpful. I will add that when I first started designing sites, it was a lot of trial and error because I had no previous training. I just learned on the fly for the most part. The good news is that, all things considered, you can develop a pretty nice site with some basic programming.

Actually, as a plug for myself, if you are new to site design, check out the Guide To Better Web Pages (http://www.harbormoon.com/guide/) that I wrote nearly ten years ago. It doesn't speak to web code but does brief the reader on creating clean, creative, and quality web sites that grab your attention and make an impression.