DreamBook: General

How do I create a Dreambook?
It's easy! Simply go to http://www.dreambook.com.

Click on the "Make a Dreambook" link.

Enter the following information into the apporopriate text boxes: The web ID (username) you'd like. Think of a password, and enter it into the first box. Enter it again into the second box. Your birthday (used to recover your password). Your email address. An Answer to your Secret Question.  Please consider also filling out the rest of the info there. Press the Sign Up Now! button. Click the link that says "Click here to continue.." and you'll be at the form you need to complete to make your first book! 

Do I have to host my site with Dreamhost to get a Dreambook?
Nope!

Feel free to build yourself a  free, customized Dreambook, and to link to it from your site, no matter where your site is hosted!

However, if you do host your site with DreamHost, you can turn off the banner ads that appear at the top of your guestbook page.

Why would I want a guestbook?
Guestbooks let visitors to your page leave comments and remarks. It adds more content to any site, and its fun for you to read as well. You can see from where and when people are looking at your page, and also get valuable feedback. Its one of the simplest ways to add interactivity to your site.

What's so special about this guestbook server?
Unlike most guestbook servers (free and otherwise), you can completely customize Dreambook to match your site. In normal editing mode, you can pick from a variety of templates (some of which were submitted by users just like you), and if you switch into advanced mode, you can edit the html directly to make your own custom forms. You decide what fields appear in your guestbook, and how they are arranged. You can even ask your visitors questions and create complex questionaires.

Will it be free forever?
Yes!

The basic Dreambook service will be served completely without charge forever. To support it, though, banner ads will be shown on each guestbook. In the future, we also plan to offer more elaborate guestbook services, such as bulletin board style formats. Look out for our Dreambook Plus version allowing you features such as periodic caching, unlimited entries, log file summaries, and more.

Can I have my guestbook in a language other than English?
Yes you can!

Our system can store and print any sort of character encoding you enter into it, so Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, whatever, will all work!

The only thing that can't be translated is the date of posts, if you have them in a format like "Wednesday, December 29th" unfortunately.

Since you can completely customize the look (and text) of your DreamBook, you can also name your fields and sign form in any language you'd like.

To customize your forms, log into the DreamBook management area from www.dreambook.com, click on your book, then click on "Customize Forms."

From here, you can customize any and all of the different parts of your DreamBook, and make them say whatever you want, in whatever language you want.

Note: This is not a translation service. To have a foreign language guestbook, you must edit the HTML code of your Dreambook with the correct tags, then enter the foreign language text yourself. To learn more about how to do that, check out these links on internationalization.

<li>Browsing the Alphabets of the World (Webmonkey) <li>Symbols, Accents, and Funky Characters (Webmonkey) <li>HTML internationalization (W3C)</ul>

New security feature
I am getting slammed with junk entries in my Dreambook. They all use the same email address. Is there a way to block entries by email instead of by IP address. Or is there a way to auto verify email address before posting. Or can you put in on of the pictures with the letter/number combination to type in to verify before posting?


 * It looks like they have now added the "type the letter/number combination below," but is there any way to turn that feature off? &mdash;Twigboy 11:53, 12 Mar 2006 (PST)


 * I contacted support. They answered: "Unfortunately, no, at this time, there's no way to turn that off. Sorry about that." &mdash;Twigboy 10:48, 20 Mar 2006 (PST)