How to integrate a guestbook on your blog?

Featuring a guestbook guestbook on your site is an easy way to get feedback from your readers. One of the easiest, cleanest, best featured and well supported guestbooks I have found is Ultraguest.

They also have a user forum and a problem reporting system. Important that the Ultraguest guestbook has an anti-spam filter.. And it all comes for free.

The way to create the guestbook is pretty self explanatory, if you follow the instructions on their site. The fun bit starts in the way you integrate your guestbook within your site, as by default Ultraguest gives you some plain code, which looks (on the screen) like:

Not too attractive for people to click on, no? Here is how we make it a bit sexier:

I created a button for it, like this one (you can actually click this button to see how ultraguest’s book looks like):

Step by step:

• Go to one of the free websites that let you make buttons. I use Cooltext . Easy configurable, and they let you save the button you created onto your hard disk as a .GIF file…
• Upload the button itself onto your FTP server, or if you (like me) use standard blogging software, upload it to one of the public and free picture servers (I use Flickr).
• Once uploaded, you get a URL that points to your picture, which looks something like:
  

  http://farm1.static.flickr.com/181/4152daf_o.gif

• Then on your web, integrate your button with the following HTML code:
  

  <a href=
  “http://www.ultraguest.com/sign/yournumber”>
  <title=”anytext” src=”yourpicture-url”/></a>

  “your number” is your guestbook number
  (see the code you get in your Ultraguest control panel)

  “anytext” is the text shown when people move their cursor over the button
  (e.g. ‘Just to say hi or to give feedback about my website!’)

  “yourpicture-url” is the url you got back from your picture server,
  pointing to your button

Have fun!

Tagged as: html, tips