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. When I left the university in 2005, the portal shut down and so did the guestbook. The original website 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.

After leaving the university, I set up this website on the World Wide Web and included some of the content from the original intranet portal. 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 comments generator.

Unfortunately, I could not restore all the comments from the original guestbook. The Classic ASP source code of my intranet portal as well as the guestbook database are now lost to time. 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. It is only a small fraction of what once existed, but it feels good to have even those few 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!