Kismet's Former Guestbook

     When I started my first web site, Kismet's Haven, in 1999, I added a guestbook for several reasons.  The writer in me wanted to see if anyone would read my site and respond to it.  The new webmaster in me added the guestbook because it was just one of the things you did when you made a personal web site, and it didn't seem as tacky as adding a hit counter.  I wasn't very concerned with how many people were visiting the site - I already knew that my tiny, inexpert, brand-new site wasn't going to get much traffic - but I did want to know what people had to say about it down the line.  To my enjoyment, people started signing the guestbook even though they had to spend their time to do so and had to put up with lots of advertisements.  A good number of my friends online and offline signed it along with many folks I'd never met.  I began to make other web sites not long after my first (since html can be like a drug in the beginning) but I kept one guestbook for all of them.

     For a long time, I was content just to have the easy means for people to leave feedback.  Over time, however, I began to want more options.  I wanted to be able to do more with how the guestbook looked, and I wanted more control in general.  The company that I kept my guestbook with didn't offer many options to its free customers so I began to look elsewhere.  Only recently (as of mid 2006) have I found what I wanted and started a new guestbook from scratch.  But I don't just want to delete the old guestbook, and I can't set it to read-only mode (and if spammers can still try to post, they will).  So I have transferred the old entries as they were to these pages with no advertising and only a little formatting for easier browsing.  Most of the pages have seven entries per page, and I have gone out of my way not to add or erase anything.  For me this is a kind of scrapbook covering a span of seven years and at least four of my web sites and containing the thoughts of friends I no longer have contact with.  It's important to me to be able to look back and smile on these pages and to keep them connected with the rest of my guestbook.  So for those of you who think that guestbooks don't matter at all to web masters, take this as a big exception - and feel free to browse the book in its entirety.