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Your guestbook is composed of 2 files, addbook.html which is the page used to add an entry to the guestbook, and geobook.html which is your guestbook page.
You GeoCities GuestBook can almost be edited entirely in FrontPage, but not quite, after editing the addbook.html file in FrontPage, you will always have to open it in NotePad and fix the value="<!-- *FINAL* -->" hidden input value (see step 4 below). Outside of that and a few other quirks, it is not too difficult.
There is one important concept that you should understand (it has nothing to do with FrontPage). The geobook.html file contains the only copy of your GuestBook entries. If you accidently upload an old version of geobook.html, you will loose any new entries in your GuestBook. For this reason, I normally keep my addbook.html and geobook.html files in a separate directory. I only temporarily put them into my local file web for editing and uploading, then I move them back to the other directory. This way I never upload them to GeoCities by accident. Also, once you have GuestBook entries that you don't want to loose, Always Download geobook.html from GeoCities before you edit it.
Note: For more information about the GeoCities GuestBook, visit the HELP GUIDEBOOK for your GeoCities Guestbook
Go to the GeoCities GuestBook page and generate your guestbook. The key choices that you have to make at this point are:
The Fields - you must decide up front what fields you want in your guestbook. You can only change the fields by generating a new guestbook. Also, the first three fields (Name, URL, EMail) appear to be required by GeoCities, so unless you are a brave soul, don't change these. You can add up to 6 fields (numbered 4->9) of your own to the guestbook.
The Separators - are used to separate the entries in the guestbook. The separators you can use for your guestbook, are the same ones GeoCities makes available in their page editors. You might be able to use your own, I haven't tried this.
The Style - is how the fields will be layed out as an entry is added to your guestbook. You get your choice of a rather meager, 4 styles.
As for the background colors and other stuff for the pages, you can always change those when you edit the addbook.html and geobook.html files.
Go to the GeoCities file manager and download geobook.html, saving it under the name of geobook.txt, the code generated is next to useless, so you will be creating your own geobook.html, then copying 4 html lines from the original file. Download addbook.html twice, saving it once as addbook.txt, and once as addbook.html .For instructions on downloading files, see my View Source page.
Using windows NotePad, open geobook.txt and print it out, then open addbook.txt and print it out. Read the Comment Lines at the top enclosed in <!-- comment... -->. Keep these original files around for future referance.
Note: If you can't view these files in NotePad, you should skip the rest of my instructions, and just use your guestbook as generated by GeoCities.
Using windows NotePad, open addbook.html, then delete all the comment lines at top that are enclosed in <!-- comment... -->, and then save the file. These lines look like heck, when you bring them into the FrontPage editor (actually you get around 12 lines that contain a [!]).
Copy addbook.html to your local FrontPage web, then start up FrontPage and open addbook.html in the FrontPage editor.
Remember to follow the rules you read in the comments. Do not change any Form Properties. The only Form Field property that you can change is the 'Width in charaters', or the 'Number of Lines'. You can move the fields around on the Form if you are careful, using Edit/Cut and Edit/Paste.
You can change anything else on the page, but any links or images you put on the page must be fully qualified (eg. http://www.oocities.org/SouthBeach/Sands/1492/jeffdoor.gif), even if they are in you home site. I recomend putting a link back to your guestbook, remember to fully qualify it (mine would be: http://www.oocities.org/SouthBeach/Sands/1492/geobook.html ).
I also recomend keeping your changes as few as possible, just in case you ever have to re-generate your guestbook (because GeoCities might change how they do it).
Save addbook.html and Close the FrontPage Editor. Using windows NotePad, open addbook.html, and do the following:
Find the Lines:
<form action="/cgi-bin/geoplus_apps/ans_entry"
method="POST">
<input type="hidden" name="final"
value="<!-- *FINAL* -->"><input
type="hidden"
Replace the < and > with < and > as follows:
<form action="/cgi-bin/geoplus_apps/ans_entry"
method="POST">
<input type="hidden" name="final"
value="<!-- *FINAL* -->"><input
type="hidden"
Save addbook.html, you are now finished with this file.
Important Note: I know this is a
pain, you have to do this editing in NotePad, every time you edit
your addbook.html file.
(The FrontPage editor makes this replacement, so that a browser
dosn't confuse the value with HTML, and a browser will replace
the < and > with the proper symbols when displaying
the value. But this value was made up by GeoCities (in their
infinite wisdom), and gets sent to their CGI-Script, not
displayed in a browser.)
Start the FrontPage editor and create a new page file geobook.html . This is your GuestBook file. You can go to town on this page, creating whatever header and footer, page background, that you want. Just leave a Blank Line in the middle of the page, this is where the GuestBook Entries will go.
In the FrontPage Editor position the cursor on the page where you want the GuestBook Entries to go (the blank line from Step 5). Go to the Insert Menu, and select the HTML MarkUp sub-menu item. A dialog box will appear where you can enter HTML that will not be parsed by FrontPage.
Leave this dialog open, then using windows NotePad open the geobook.txt file. Find the following 4 lines of HTML (your separator bar .gifs may be different):
<IMG
SRC="/pictures/icons/lines/blue_thin_line_2.gif">
<IMG
SRC="/pictures/icons/lines/blue_thin_line_2.gif"
GBICON=1 height=0 width=0>
<!-- ADD NEW GB ENTRY HERE --><p>
<!-- END_ENTRIES -->
Then copy and paste these lines into the HTML dialog in FrontPage, and Press the OK button. As GeoCities adds GuestBook Entries to your page, they are placed in this block of HTML.
Next you should add a link to the Add Entry form into your guestbook. Somewhere on the page type in the text 'Sign My GuestBook' (or whatever you like), highlight the text, then on the FrontPage Editor Insert Menu, select the Hyperlink sub-menu item. The Create Hyperlink properties notebook will open, switch to the World Wide Web Tab, then fill in the Page field with:
/cgi-bin/geoplus_apps/ans_entry
Press Ok, this is the CGI-Script which loads your addbook.html file.
On the View menu, select the HTML sub-menu item. The a dialog containing the HTML for your page appears. Find the /cgi-bin/geoplus_apps/ans_entry link entry, if FrontPage inserted some ../../.. in front of the link, delete them and Press OK.
Save your geobook.html file, you are now finished with this file.
Upload the two files addbook.html and geobook.html to your GeoCities address, and you are all done (of course you should add a link on one of your pages to geobook.html).
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JES - 03/29/98