Welcome to the MJA Labs Guestbook for OS/2

Note: This program was designed to be used with the IBM Internet Connection Server for OS/2, it should work with other OS/2 servers that support CGI but has not been tested.

Introduction

Welcome! This is my first attempt at writing software to be released to the public and it is the first product to come out of MJA Labs. I am releasing this guestbook CGI program as e-mailware. If you like it take a minute or two and send me some e-mail at mendolf@wpi.edu.

Program Description

This package includes a set of two CGI programs and three html files which make up the guestbook set. The first file displayed is the actual guestbook, which conains a link to the entry form page. This page contains a standard form which allows the visitor to enter information about their name, e-mail address, homepage, hometown, and a brief message. The first program then generates a confirmation page (using confirm.html as the header). The visitor is then asked to confirm that the information entered is correct. When the visitor confirms the information the guestbook.html file is updated and displayed.

Installation

In this sample installation the IBM Internet Connection Server was installed to

e:\wwwserver

using the standard directory structure.
This guestbook must be installed on an HPFS drive.

Unzip all of the files into a temporary directory.

Copy all of the html files to your main web page directory.

COPY *.html e:\wwwserver\HTML

COPY *.gif e:\wwwserver\HTML

Copy the exe and cfg files to your CGI-BIN directory.

COPY *.exe e:\wwwserver\CGI-BIN

COPY *.cfg e:\wwwserver\CGI-BIN

Edit the configuration file to show the position of your web page directory.

e e:\wwwserver\CGI-BIN\guestbook.cfg

For this example the file should be a single line containing

e:\wwwserver\HTML\

Note the tailing backslash is important.

Edit the top of the guestbook.html file, the top of the guestentry.html file and the confirm.html file to present the look you want.

Use the guestbook to make your first entry, when you are sure it works add a link to it from your homepage.

If upgrading from version 1.x keep your guestbook file. If the guestbook file grows too large you can rename it and provide a link to it in the top of the current page.

Note to Apache users: change the lines in the guestentry.html and the confirm.html that contain the FORM line

from /cgi-bin/guestentry to /cgi-bin/guestentry.exe

and

from /cgi-bin/confirm to /cgi-bin/confirm.exe

Note: DO NOT change the last three lines of the guestbook.html file. The script relies on the length of these lines to update the page.

Version History

Version 1.0 - Initial Release.
Version 1.1 - Added fix to add http:// to url entry if not supplied.
Version 1.2 - Added time/date stamp to entries, allows easier tracking of web traffic.: Based on a suggestion by Shawn Reed
Version 1.3 - Fixed a problem with guestbook running on Apache web server.

Further Help

If you need any further help, have questions or comments please e-mail me at mendolf@wpi.edu.

Thanks,
Michael Ayers