I Reinstated My Guestbook After 20 Years!

I have reinstated the guestbook on this website after 20 years! As I have written in the About page, this website began its life as an intranet portal in my university network back in 2001–2005. That portal first ran on Microsoft Personal Web Server (PWS) and later on Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), with the guestbook data stored in a Microsoft Access database. At the same time, I also maintained a small public website on the Internet, hosted on a subdomain provided by a free hosting service, where I published a subset of the articles from the intranet portal. Both the intranet portal and the public website had guestbooks. The guestbook on the public website was powered by a CGI script provided by the hosting service, which inserted each comment directly into the guestbook HTML page. As some of you might guess, yes, it was vulnerable to cross-site scripting, but that's beside the point.

After leaving the university, I registered my own domain name and set up my current website on the World Wide Web, and included some of the content from both the original intranet portal and the old public website. For some reason, though, I never thought to include a guestbook. And so this website went on without a guestbook for the next 20 years. Finally, in June 2025, I decided to bring the guestbook back. I already had a commenting system implemented for this website using Common Lisp and Hunchentoot, so I simply reused it for the guestbook. The server program accepts POST requests to receive comments and writes them to text files for manual review. The comments are then rendered as static HTML pages by my static site generator. In a way, it is less a comment system and more a static comment pages generator.

Unfortunately, I could not restore all the comments from the original guestbook. The ASP source code of my intranet portal as well as the guestbook database are now lost to time. Note that what I refer to as ASP here is now known as Classic ASP, to avoid confusion with ASP.NET. A CD-ROM backup eventually succumbed to disc rot, and with it vanished the source code and the database. But a handful of comments had survived because they had found their way into other files and correspondence, and I have now included them here. I had better luck with the guestbook of the old public website, from which I was able to recover a greater number of comments. It is still only a small fraction of what once existed, but it feels good to have even those fragments preserved. The new guestbook is now available here: Guestbook.

I wasn't expecting anybody to notice the new guestbook. It is only mentioned in the About and Links pages, neither of which see much traffic. But to my surprise, a few cheerful comments have trickled in. For example, one of them said:

I love that your website has a guestbook! :D

Another said:

Love the guestbook! We need more of these. Makes you feel invited.

It's a small addition to my website, but after two decades, it feels good to see the guestbook alive again, and even better to see visitors enjoying it!