After finishing up with the archives page, the last section left is to create the comments page, or basically the guestbook page. I've seen many sites have this and thought it would be cool to have one on mine too. I think it'd be great for feedback, plus if you have any questions, you can type them there and I'll do my best to answer!
The neat part is that there are already tools built for this stuff, so there's no need to build them from scratch. I found these tools so far:
Smart Guestbook
Atabook
They're both free. I'm going to try atabook in this case so I will cover that. I think both provide the same features from what I've seen so it doesn't matter what you go for (I think). You will need to register an account for using either of them.
After making your Atabook account, make sure you're on the Control Panel section. Check the Guestbook Layout section on your left and underneath that, select Change layout. Now style it as you like. You may notice two areas I blacked out, one's the title of the guest book within the section, and the other being the URL of your guestbook placed on the top left. Click on the top left to see the preview and send a message to see if everything looks okay. You can also test replies in the Message control section under Guestbook management
Awesome! But how do we implement this on our site? We just need one line in our html, which is the iframe tag, which is like an embed, where it'll take the content of this guestbook from whatever service you used, and display it on our page without having to go there. Like this. I also centered it using a guestbook class:
<iframe src="https://yourusernamehere.atabook.org/" class="guestbook"></iframe>
But I noticed that there was a scroll effect happening within the iframe which creates two scrollbars, when I'd want just one scroll effect per page. I looked up to see that scrolling = "no" is a solution, but it seems to have been deprecated. So I just changed height to min-height in my class and put in a large value.
And here's what it looks like:
Alright, the basis of my website is done! I'm now cleaning up my code to ensure that all the links are in the right place, as well as removing any placeholders I kept, such as my home and about page. If you're using github, make sure to push all the changes you've been making! Ta-da, we've made a website! This is basically the end of my log for making it from scratch. But whatever I work on this site will still be logged in the future. So if you're interested in certain aspects of this site, keep a lookout or use the search function to look for something specific. Have fun!