How to Make Guestbook Presents

Many people like to leave small gifts in guestbooks when they sign them. These gifts are generally an image or two (or more) with links to various locations. Sometimes these are very simple, being just an image with a link, and sometimes they can be very complex with tables, scrolling marquee's and various other special effects.

Groups such as Random Acts Of Kindness and Misker's Denizens are especially active at leaving gifts. If you join one of these groups many people will visit your site to leave dozens and perhaps even hundreds of welcome notes and images!

So how do you go about leaving images and such in guestbooks?

First, find or make an image. If you are on a welcoming committee of a group, you will almost certainly be able to find many images in their welcoming section or "gift shop". You can use one of these or make your own.

Now you need to locate a place to host the image for you. Most people seem to just stick it on their web sites, which may not be such a good idea, especially if your site is located on a free host such as Angelfire, Tripod or Xoom. These hosts now block this kind of thing and replace your image with their own corporate logo. Why? Free hosts make their income off of advertising, and if you are just displaying a graphic image you are not displaying their ads. This is known as bandwidth stealing.

So where do you host your images? Well, read the terms and conditions of your own host and see if they allow remote linking to images. Virtually none of the free hosts will allow this, as this costs them money without them getting any revenue in return.  If, on the other hand, you are paying for hosting then go ahead, it's your bandwidth and space to do with what you will. 

A better place to store your images is called Photoloft. These guys actually allow you to place photos in an album (which is a cool service). In addition, you can use their site to generate much of the code that you will need for your guestbook! Note that Photoloft is not free, but the price is very small.

I have written tutorials for different photo storage services:

• Photoloft 

Okay, regardless of where you store your image, you now need to create the code which will be placed in guestbooks.

1. Start up the Notepad program.
2. Enter your link tag. An example of the link tag is shown below.
   
   <a href="http://www.internet-tips.net">
   
3. Enter your image tag. 
   
   <img src="http://www.internet-tips.net/images/richardlowe.gif">
   
4. Close your link tag.
   
   </a>

Here's how the present looks from a host:

<a href="http://www.internet-tips.net">
<img src="http://www.internet-tips.net/images/richardwebmaster.gif">
</a>

Now simply store that code somewhere, say in a text file, on your system, and keep it ready when you need to use it. At that time, simply copy it into the guestbook wherever you want the picture to appear.

Additional Information

• Maintain Your Guestbook Many webmasters include a guestbook on their site. Guestbooks are important and must be well kept to be useful.
• Netiquette - Guestbook Entries Guestbooks are a great way to leave public messages to a webmaster. Just be nice, complementary and helpful.
• Using Photoloft for your images If you are leaving presents in guestbooks, it's important not to steal bandwidth. Photoloft is an inexpensive way to leave presents without being unethical.
• Bandwidth stealing Bandwidth stealing is the linking to images or scripts from another site without permission, thus using that sites bandwidth without compensation.
• Sins of the internet- Bandwidth Stealing This sin costs hosts millions of dollars a year - and often you don't even know that you did it!