Visitors to your website can come and see who has signed the
guestbook, and they can sign it themselves, leaving their name, e-mail
address, comments, their website address, etc. Submitted entries can
either be emailed to you, added to an online Web page, or both.
Signing Up For A Guestbook For Your Website
Setting up the file permissions to permit the Web server to write to
a guestbook in your directory is somewhat tricky. Doing so is also
difficult to execute over an FTP connection. The most efficient way
to do this for all concerned is for FishNet to install a skeletal
guestbook for you. You can then customize the files based on the
information in this page.
For an additional one time fee of $37.50 we will be glad to help you
customize the form for your Web site.
Guestbook Files
The files used by the guestbook are given below. These files should
be in the guestbook directory. If the optional files do not exist,
small default messages will be displayed if the error occurs.
NAME
DESCRIPTION
top.html
Required; this is the HTML for the top of the actual guestbook
bottom.html
Optional; this is the HTML for the page foot of the actual guestbook
noname.html
Optional; shown if they forgot to enter their name
nocomment.html
Optional; shown if they didn't give a comment
notags.html
Optional; shown if they used HTML in their comments
bademail.html
Optional; shown if their e-mail address is messed up
badurl.html
Optional; shown if their URL address is messed up
fileerror.html
Optional; shown if there was a file error
thanks.html
Optional; shown if their signature addition was successful.
The Guestbook Form
The guestbook is quite flexible and can be configured completely from
hidden data fields within the guestbook form. The following
data fields can be set within the guestbook HTML form.
NAME
CONTENT
DESCRIPTION
_MAILTO
E-mail Name
Where to e-mail the signature. Leave blank to not e-mail.
_POSTIT
Yes/No
Whether or not to even store the signature in an HTML page.
_NEWONTOP
Yes/No
Store the entries with newest additions on top? (Newest first)
_SHOWEMAIL
Yes/No
Whether or not to show signer's e-mail addresses on the page.
_SHOWURL
Yes/No
Whether or not to show signer's URLs on the HTML page.
_SHOWCOMMENT
Yes/No
Whether or not to show signer's comments on the HTML page.
_SHOWFROM
Yes/No
Whether or not to show signer's "how they got here" on the HTML page.
_KEEP
Yes/No
How many signatures to keep around. Set to 0 to keep all.
(ie, if you set it to 100, when you receive your 101st
signature, your first (oldest) one will be deleted;
when you receive your 102nd, your second (now oldest) one
will be deleted, and so on.
These data fields will be stored as hidden fields in your form. An
example is below:
For the yes/no data fields the value fields will be
"yes" or "no".
The standard set of input fields (boxes where the user types) are as
follows:
NAME
DESCRIPTION
_NAME
Signer's name. (REQUIRED)
_EMAIL
Signer's e-mail address.
_URL
Signer's URL (website address).
_COMMENT
Signer's comments. (REQUIRED)
_FROM
How the signer got to your website ("where they came from").
These fields are normal input fields. An example:
What is your name?
What did you think of my page?
Additional fields can be added in the data form for entry in the
guestbook and in the e-mail. Any input field in the form whose name
does NOT start with an underscore ("_") will be shown. For example:
What's your age?
Would show up in the guestbook and the e-mail as:
Age: 21
Additional Features
Some things to remember about GBook is that you can have any of the
following combinations done with people's signatures:
Multiple guest logging options:
e-mail it to you only
e-mail it to you and post it to the online guestbook
post it on a page only
the e-mail address in the "mailto" field can be multiple e-mail
addresses. Just combine them with commas (","):
Some other uses of the guestbook could be a simple form of voting booth,
a simple form-to-mail program (the user could even use a radio-button or
pull-down menu to decide which e-mail address(es) to send to!), and more...
Saturday: September 4, 2010 
