In the early days of web design one of the few interactive things you could do with your readers was set up a guest book. At first this was next to impossible because almost anyone and everyone who had a website was operating on free sites like Geocities, Angelfire, or Tripod. There was no cgo access unless you paid for it, so there was no interaction beyond the simple mail form. Eventually most of them had heard the call for interaction and offered up ready made guest books. By that time it was really too late to do anything about it, blogging had been invented and was taking quick hold on sites like LiveJournal and Blogger. The world of interactivity was upon the average website owner, and we went from simple users to publishers.
The advent of blogging with threaded post and comments we respond to or at the very least should be responding to left behind the old guest book format. Users could now interact with authors directly over on subject specific ideas. Simply put the guest book was stiff, bereft of use, pushing up digital daisies, had run down the curtained screen saver, had emptied the recycle bin with ccleaner, overwritten multiple times with randomized ones and zeroes, and joined auto-starting background midi files as things Skippy should never put on a site. The guest book was and ex-webpage! That was until I figured out a use for it.
I know you are thinking this guy is ought of his bloody mind. Well I might be, but never the less I know how to make the guest book useful once again. Every blogger gets comment like ‘this is nice’ and ‘I like the post’. For those of us kind bloggers using a dofollow system this is annoying crap. However with a nofollow guest book and a move comments plugin we can preserve those comments, because some of them actually mean what they say and could give a damn about the backlink, and keep our blogs from being fodder for spammers. The second plugin you will want if you wish to keep dofollow status is a conditional plugin that allows for conditional nofollow noindex posts and pages.
Once you have your plugin installed you can start by creating the guest book. If you are a nofollow blog the process is pretty simple, just create called guest book add a few lines of text and stick the post link in your menu. Alternately if your theme allows for comments on pages you can make it a page and it should automatically go into your navigation structure. Assuming you are a kind dofollow blogger honoring your readers comments, you are going to need to do a few things differently for the guest book to work like it should and not screw up the rest of your blog.
After activating the plugins the next thing you will want to do is make a copy of your single.php and rename it guestbook_template.php. This is the file we will edit. Top the top of this file you will want to add the following code:
<?php
/*
Template Name: guestbook
*/
?>
Once this page is uploaded create a new page using the guestbook page template. Say a few words of kind warning about the kind of comments that should go in posts and the kind that belong here. Set the page to nofollow and noindex and you are ready to go. Move your comments at will and enjoy your new found guest book.
Post 8 of 100 of Brad’s Tiny World Scribefire Challenge.
Comments
2 Comments on The Guest Book
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Itsme from Greenville IT Support on
Wed, 22nd Oct 2008 6:02 am
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blogboy on
Wed, 22nd Oct 2008 9:38 am
Interesting use for a guestbook. I think that’s a good idea.
I ran across something interesting in a guestbook the other day. To make a long story short, I had an old email address for someone, and tried to track them down. I found their signature in an old (1999) guestbook. While I was at that site, I discovered that a hacker had planted some redirect code in the guestbook.
I tried to contact the site author, but the email bounced. It seems the site might have been a zombie site on autopilot since 2002. As time goes on, I wonder how much of the web might become like that.
If you ever saw a Stephen King movie named “The Langoliers,” perhaps we need something like that to move zombie sites out of the way.
@Itsme@Greenville IT Support - As sites and users move towards using more open ID information online migrating and updating data for both site owners and users will become extremely easy.
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