GeoCities GuestBook

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.

Your 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="" 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. Also, before publishing your web with FrontPage, if you have a GeoCities Guestbook (geobook.html) as part of your web. Make sure you download, rename, and/or backup geobook.html, because the current version on your hard drive will be published.

NOTE

If your GuestBook has the GeoGuide on it, always go to the GeoGuide Manager first, and de-activate the page before Downloading. This is to keep the GeoGuide Tag from being replaced with the GeoGuide HTML. Another way to avoid this problem, is to download geobook.html using FTP, this circumvents the GeoCities page processor which adds the GeoCities code to pages.

Step 1 - Generate addbook.html and geobook.html

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. If you want to use your own separators, just pick any separators to generate your GuestBook, later on when you are Editing (Creating) geobook.htm you can change them.

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.

Step 2 - download addbook.html and geobook.html

Go to the GeoGuide Manager, and de-activate the GeoGuide for your geobook.html file. Then 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 . The best way to download these files, is to open (browse) them in MS Internet Explorer (click on the View link in the GeoCities File manager). Then on the View Menu of MS Internet Explorer, select the Source sub-menu (this opens the file in Notepad, and fixes the naked linefeeds), and then save them from the Notepad program. For alternate 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 . Keep these original files around for future referance.

Step 3 - Edit addbook.html the Add Entry Form

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.

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).

Step 4 - Save addbook.html

Save addbook.html and Close the FrontPage Editor. Using windows NotePad, open addbook.html, and do the following:

<form action="/cgi-bin/geoplus_apps/ans_entry" method="POST">
<input type="hidden" name="final"
value="<!-- *FINAL* -->"><input type="hidden"

<form action="/cgi-bin/geoplus_apps/ans_entry" method="POST">
<input type="hidden" name="final"
value=""><input type="hidden"

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.)

Step 5 - Create geobook.html your GuestBook Page

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.

Step 6 - Insert Geo HTML into geobook.html

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 FrontPage Component sub-menu item, a list will pop-up, select Insert HTML and press OK. 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):

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.

If you want to change the separators used in your GuestBook to your own. In the above HTML lines, just replace "/pictures/icons/lines/blue_thin_line_2.gif" with "yourfile.gif". It is important that you leave the GBICON=1 parameter, this is used by the GeoCities GuestBook processor, and if it is missing, you will get plain horizontal lines separating your entries.

Step 7 - Link to addbook from geobook.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, fill in the URL field with:

Step 8 - Save geobook.html

Step 9 - Upload geobook.html and addbook.html

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).

Go to the GeoGuide Manager, and activate the GeoGuide for your geobook.html file (if you have the GeoGuide on your guestbook page).

Edit GuestBook Entries

Go to the GeoGuide Manager, and de-activate the GeoGuide for your geobook.html file.

Put your cursor on the blank line in the middle of your guestbook (this is the hidden HTML markup for your guestbook entries). Then switch the FrontPage Editor to the HTML View (tab at the bottom). You can then edit the HTML for you entries.

Note: In my GuestBook Settup instructions above. I intentionally had you place the HTML for the GuestBook entries inside an HTML markup WebBot. This is so that FrontPage does not parse and alter the HTML for the GuestBook Entries. This also helps (but does not guarantee) to protect your page, if someone enters Bad HTML. When the FrontPage Editor parses bad HTML, it can eat (destroy) all or part of your GuestBook page (geobook.html).

A GuestBook Entry starts with a REMOTE ADDR line, and ends with a <br> tag (after your separator image), as follows:

If you delete an entry, you should delete the entire block of lines for that entry.

Splitting The GuestBook To 2 Pages