Having a guestbook allows your visitors to post information or comments directly to your site and have other vistors see them. There are only a few of steps that you must take to put a guestbook on your site.

Note:

You must have some knowledge of creating forms in HTML (and/or Cascading Style Sheets) in order to have a guestbook on your site. This counter will only work on the CommunityNet server.

1. Create the Web page containing your form.
   
   This page can be designed any way you want provided that you use the following attributes in your <FORM> tag:
   
   <FORM ACTION="your_thankyou_page.html" METHOD="get">
   
   Also remember to name your form fields which will make the email you receive from this form easier to read. For example:
   
   <INPUT NAME ="Name" TYPE="text" SIZE="30"> would be appropriate for the field asking for the name of the person.

2. Create the area where your guestbook entries will appear.
   
   Either on an entirely different page, or directly below the form you just created, insert the following line at the absolute left side of your code:
   
   <!-- HWCN GUESTBOOK INSERT AFTER THIS LINE -->
   
   This line must appear exactly as shown and must contain no characters or spaces before it. If it is not to the absolute left of your coding, the guestbook will not work.

Note:

<!-- HWCN GUESTBOOK INSERT AFTER THIS LINE --> will place the newest entries first <!-- HWCN GUESTBOOK INSERT BEFORE THIS LINE --> will place the newest entries last

3. Create your Thank You page.
   
   Your Thank You page is the page that does all the work. You can name the page anything you want, but remember that you type the identical name in your ACTION attribute of your <FORM> tag (1st page).
   
   Place the following SSI codes on your Thank You page replacing xxxxxxxx.html with the name of the page that holds the line <!-- HWCN GUESTBOOK INSERT AFTER THIS LINE -->:
   
   <!--#set var="GUESTBOOK" value="xxxxxxxx.html" -->
   <!--#include virtual="/cgi-bin/hwcnguestbook" -->

4. Use the CHMOD option in your FTP program.
   
   In order to execute the SSI, we need to set the file's 'owner execution' permission flag, so that the server will know to look for these commands hidden in the HTML comments.
   
   In WS-FTP_LE, right click on the name of your web page in the Remote (HWCN side) directory display, and a menu will pop up with chmod (UNIX) listed. Click on that, and you will see a dialog box with permissions checkboxes. Check the box for Execute box under the heading Owner OR change the Numeric value to 744. Click on OK.

You now have a basic guestbook for your site! When a user submits an entry using the form they will get a page that says "Thank you for your submission" and then list the fields that they entered. Their entry will appear in the area where you placed
<!-- HWCN GUESTBOOK INSERT AFTER THIS LINE -->

You can 'fine tune' your guestbook by adding additional SSI command(s) ABOVE the initial SSI commands above.