Strange how some things hit you just because you deserve it. I was working on a client’s blog recently when he requested that I put in a guestbook for him. I’d never put in a guestbook for a WordPress.com blog before, so I did some Googling and Binging (Microsoft’s new search engine is not bad) and found a very nice and free guestbook at Slide. Instructions were straightforward and easy to follow, and with a few clicks of the mouse, my client’s blog had a guestbook—he was happy, I was happy, everything’s good.
Then it was as if someone threw a brick at my head and shouted, “Hey you dork! Your blog is already over a year old—where’s your guestbook?” Oh man, that voice was right—I’d not even thought about putting a guestbook in my blog, aw this is silly of me. I searched through the WordPress plug-ins since I’m hosting my own WP blog. There were a couple of guestbook thingies, tried one or two, hmm not too interesting or attractive for that matter.
Went back to Slide, did my own customizing and came up with a pretty nice guestbook. Tried putting it into a new blog page, and that was when the trouble started. I just couldn’t get it to work! Instead of displaying a guestbook, all that I could see were the lines of code. It was futile trying to do it in the WP admin, so I tried Windows Live Writer instead. And you know what, just copying the HTML code and pasting it into a new page won’t work, no matter how much you cuss. The trick is to create a single-cell table, and then paste the code into it. Even so, you have to select the Paste Special command in order to get the HTML to show up. I did this, and voila! Here’s one neat (at least to me) Guestbook in my blog.
The great thing about the Slide guestbook is that visitors and readers can choose to upload a picture and paste it into their guestbook entry. This beats all the other boring guestbooks which only allow text.
I hope you’ll sign my guestbook here. Thank you!
