Last evening I was looking over a guestbook post page and noticed that my footer information was missing from the page. I investigated the problem but could not put my finger on the specific difficulty. I went to the site from which I had downloaded the script to see if there was any information there. I found that there is a new guestbook script available.

The new script was written to improve the security in the script. It will have to replace the old guestbooks as there is not an upgrade path except by replacement. I will investigate the possibility of data import, but that is not a serious problem as I only have one or two of the old ones up with any data. Worst case would be some copy and paste work with those one or two old books.

The layout of the new script is much easier to work with over-all. There were a couple of gotchas with the installation, but nothing that was not easy to overcome with my current knowledge of web design. Last month it may have been different, but I keep learning.

One problem was that there is a div with an id of wrapper in the script. An id can only be used once on a page so the second occurrence of the id blew the page layout. I changed the id and took care of the problem. The other problem was the use of floats and clearing in the script. To integrate this into my page meant that the guestbook needed to be enclosed in a floated div, a fact that I just picked up in my reading sometime last week. Floating the div meant changing the order of containers on the page, also a recent addition to my knowledge base. I made the necessary changes and uploaded a test page (not necessarily in that order).

I like the new script and would recommend it to anyone looking for a php based guestbook for their site. I look forward to working with it and will be replacing the several instances of the old script that I now have on my sites. The script is free to use and is available from myPHPscripts. It uses a captcha so guestbook spam is minimized. There are several other useful scripts available from the site. Check it out!!

I am still working on the rebuild of I Built My Computer. It is not really that big of a task, I just was distracted by earning a living last week. Most of my real business for the month of January took place last week. The first week in February will also be a busy one.

In addition, I learned how to call an XML feed and display it on a web page using a php script last evening. Using the php script brings dynamic content to your page. It is searchable and indexable by the search engine spiders. This means that you have new content on the page whenever the spider, or a visitor, stops by. From the search engine standpoint, there is more and new content to index. It is suspected that the spiders will visit the page more frequently because of the frequent change. If they visit more frequently they are likely to tell more people to come and visit.

I think that I will put a feed box from this blog on the personal home page. I found a good motorcycle related feed for the Rally site. Tech feeds are no problem for the computer and software related sites. I will look for a feed, preferably a review feed, for the Gallery site. I have several ideas of what I would like to find for the various sites.

I have learned already that I have to check for the quality of the feed before putting a page on a site. I established a directory on my web space to use for that purpose. The address for the feed goes in an include file, so upload is minimal. I copied the page a couple of times with other names and a different include file, so I can test three feeds at a time. I was hoping to have multiple feeds on a page, but the script that I am using complains about that, so I will probably use a page per feed for now. It is easy to do, because the pages can be copies with only one small change for the name of the include file. The include files can also be copies with the exception of the feed url.

I did find a site that was selling a script to do this. The customer reviews indicated that the search traffic to their sites doubled or tripled when they added the dynamic content. That software may have some bells and whistles that my barebones script does not have, but the major benefit comes from having the dynamic content.

In other news, the preliminary indication is that the rebuild to Symmetrical Backgrounds and Web Pickups are having an effect on the number of pages viewed per visit. There is really not sufficient data yet to call it a trend, but there are some indications that what I have done is helping.