Backing Up Your 123 Guestbook as HTML
Posted on May 29, 2024 by Aywren
This post is for fellow Neocities folks, as I know a number of us use the free 123 Guestbook service. This service is shutting down come July 1, and going into read-only mode in a few days. However, you can preserve your guestbook as a static HTML file – just like I have here. No one can sign it anymore, but you’ll be able to keep the memories of what people said.
How to preserve your guestbook as HTML:
- Open your guestbook page
- Right-click on a blank area of the page and select Save as… (Chrome/Opera) or Save Page As (Firefox)
- Save as Web Page, Complete
This will create an HTML file and a folder containing all the additional image/scripts/etc. files that are included. You won’t need to keep the script files as all you want is the base HTML, and maybe the images if you want to hold on to them.
Basically, now you have an HTML file that you can edit like any other HTML file. You can use a file editor, such as Brackets, or just upload it to Neocities and edit there. The CSS is all embedded in the header of these pages, so experiment with how much of the code you need to keep and how much you can trim out.
I went through and removed a bunch of the code around the submission section, for example. Since the form won’t work anymore, you don’t really need it. I just wanted to keep the entries people wrote.
Note: This gets a little trickier if you have more than one page of guestbook entries. You will have to navigate to each page and save each as an individual HTML file. I then copy-pasted all the HTML code for just the guestbook entries, and stitched it together into one page – it takes a little more work, but it’s do-able with some HTML know-how.
Good luck!