Now that blogs have become very popular, the concept of a guestbook has become antiquated. Why have a single page for comments when your visitors can comment on every single post you make?

Guestbooks still have a place on the web, even if their use is decreasing. This blog still uses a guestbook. I have long since scrapped my poorly-written script that older versions of this site used, mainly because it was susceptible to spam. I replaced it with a simple yet little-used WordPress trick: create an empty page with comments enabled. That’s it. Performing that one step effectively creates a guestbook.

There is only one issue with it: the comments are listed in the order they were originally posted, forcing users to scroll to the bottom of the list to view the latest entry. WordPress does not have a built-in way to reverse the comment order, which makes sense. It is common practice in blogs to list comments in the order they were posted, whereas guestbooks are listed in reverse order. Since WordPress is a blog platform, I can’t fault them for that.

That is where the wp-zy-roc plugin comes in. Put simply, you change a single line in that empty page I mentioned earlier (after installing and activating the reverse order plugin). Once that is done, your comments are now in reverse order. I applied the plugin to this site in less than five minutes; see them in action in the guestbook and on the You Make Kitty Scared page.

Edit: Another great plugin is the category tagging one, which creates a tag cloud. After seeing Joe’s setup for his del.icio.us links, I thought it would be a nice change from the boring old unordered list of categories that we currently use. Take a look in the sidebar and let me know what you think.