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I already mentioned before in my journal the reasons why I was taking down the Guestbook, but I figure that I might as well put some thoughts up (seeing as the previous comments were a few months old).
About a year-and-a-half ago, I thought it would be cool to throw up a Guestbook to find out the type of people who would come and visit this site as well as obtain some sort of feedback that they can post up for "the world" to see. I was also getting some e-mail responses to some of my entries, so I figured that setting up some sort of Guestbook thing would be a good way to facilitate communication between the readers and myself (and communication between the readers themselves!). It didn't take long for me (via GBC and weirDo) to find a way to set up a Guestbook on my site without using third party sites. This search started me on the journey to learn Perl. What an amazing language. Anyway, after a week or so of toying around with the scripts, and learning how to set up CGI (common gateway interface) scripts, I finally had the thing up and running. I was actually proud of that accomplishment.
That pride didn't last very long though. I realized very quickly how timid people were at putting up comments. It's the same thing as leaving messages on answering machines I guess. You never know what to say that won't offend anyone and make it worth the effort of actually putting something up. (Then again, it was pretty easy to post and read these comments..)
In any case, over the past year-and-a-half, I've had sixteen entries. Depressing sixteen. From those sixteen entries, there were eleven different people who posted comments. Well, eleven isn't that bad, except for the fact that over that period of time, there were over seven thousand unique hits to the site. It's like people would come to the site, check it out, shrug, and continue surfing. It's like people didn't care, or couldn't be bothered to comment despite some of the rather strange things I've posted up there. Now with the comment script in place, people have been commenting much more regularly (usually it's the same four yahoos, but hey, I don't mind). Sometimes we even get discussions. I think that's pretty cool, don't you?
So now we have reached the crossroads. What do I do with the Guestbook that never really took off? Leave it up? I could do that. It doesn't take up much space and there's basically no maintenance on it (seeing as nobody is using it). But I'm very much a neat freak when it comes to code. This site is no exception. I don't like loose ends, so I decided to cut this part of the site out and concentrate on some of the other parts. (I may be cutting some more things down in the near future.)
In any case, those are my thoughts. If you have any comments, then e-mail, or post something up in the comments!
