I wrote a very basic guestbook

[citizenalex]

I created my own (very basic) guestbook by writing my very first cgi script. It's so rudimentary but I'm please because of what I learned. citizenAlex's guestbook

It's just web form that writes the data to a "moderation" text file so that I can review comments. I then manually prepend non-obscene comments to the actual guestbook file, which is then linked on my site.

[jjanzen]

Writing a guestbook from scratch is a really fun project! I like the simplicity of your implementation! In my personal guestbook, I ended up creating a moderation front-end which ended up needing password protection and session cookie management and a real database. It was a good time, but just writing to a text file would have made things easier for sure. I also ended up needing to implement spam prevention because bots started finding my site and attempting to advertise in my guestbook. It was easy enough to stop spammers by including a field hidden by CSS that if filled rejects the POST request fortunately. I haven't had any since implementing that.

[citizenalex]

Thank you so much for the feedback! I really like that strategy of a hidden css field. I'm viewing the guestbook as an ongoing object of learning that I'll tinker with as I learn new things.