MAKE A PARTY SIGNATURE

Intimidated by those fancy greetings you see in the party books? Don't think you can join in because you don't know how to make a bright colorful greeting? Well you can even if you just type in a "plain jane" greeting (that has no chance of messing up the book), but even if you want a fancy greeting, party signing CAN be easy. As easy as copy and paste!

The first thing to remember is that making a book greeting is the same as making any other .html file. You create a page just for your signature. If you want more than one greeting you create an individual file for each one and keep then together either by putting them in their own directory or add "grtng" to the beginning of the file name. Some people are fortunate and don't need to edit visually, but I do. So, having my greetings as a .html file helps when I need to edit or want to change a greeting. You can use an editor to create your greetings as well, just make sure to remove the <head> and <body> tags. They aren't necessary for signing books and can actually cause problems. Once your greetings are created, you can use our "Lazy Man's Way To Sign Books" as shown below.

The rest is all HTML but there are a few things to remember. The most important of these is the following.
Always close all your tags. One failed closure will force the book owner to spend a great deal of time trying to find your mistake because it affects everything after your signature. So please, for your sanity and the book owner's sanity, close out all tags.

For example, most signatures look better centered so you would open with <center> but you need to remember to close it with </center>. Every time you open a <center> you close it with a </center>. When your greeting is finished, you may want to count each opening tag and make sure you have an equal number of closing tags. So if you have 3 <center>'s and 5 opening tags, you would need to make sure you have 3 </center>'s and 5 closing tags. More on fonts later, just be aware that whatever you open you must close.

The exception to this is tag. This adds spaces and breaks and does not need a closing tag.

One neat thing you can do with your greeting is add images. This is done much the same way as you would for a page on your site, except you have to use the entire address for the image. For example, the address for this image:

is - http://www.thesitefights.com/inkwell/images/balloons1.gif

It is also a good idea to put in the dimensions of the image so the browser knows how much space to allow for it, which makes downloading faster. The entire code for the above image would be

<img src="http://www.thesitefights.com/inkwell/balloons1.gif" width="123" height="182" border="0">

If you don't know the width and height, that's ok. It will just take longer for the image to load. But while we are talking about loading images, there are a few cautions to keep in mind:

1. It is better to use images smaller in kb size than larger ones. One of the these I do to check kb size is start to send it to someone over ICQ. I select "Send File", then I browse for the image. When I select the image, in the ICQ dialogue box there will be the size of the file. Once I see what that is, I hit "Cancel" (not "send"). It is best to keep your image file sizes below 20 kb for guestbooks, and the smaller the better. If you are giving an award, it is almost always better to email it to the recipient rather than make it a part of your guestbook greeting.

2. Don't load up on images. Select 3 or 4 that you like. The more images you have the longer it takes to load your greeting and the entire guestbook.

3. Never rename your images once they are in use and never pull them off the site you've uploaded them onto If you do either of these things, the images you have placed in every book you have signed will show up broken. So choose your images carefully and be polite: leave them up under the same name.

4. Finally, you will want to read the terms of service for your webspace provider. Many, including Geocities and Tripod, do not allow image linking and replace your images with their logos. And a few may even close your account and delete your website if they find that you have attempted to place images into a guestbook or elsewhere. But don't despair if your host doesn't allow you to link images from your site. There are other ways to make a colorful and pretty greeting.

Another way you can make your signature colorful and in the party spirit is through font face, color and style. Each has their own coding, and much of the coding can be combined to reduce the number of opening tags. First, here are the tags to open font changes:

 to change color with the # equal to a 6 digit hex number
 to make the size bigger use +# inside the "" or to make the size smaller use -# inside the ""
 to make the font a type face of your choice
 to make the writing bold
 to italicize your writing
 to underline your writing
<s> to ~~strikethrough~~ your writing

Whenever you use any of the above, you MUST close the opening tags with , , , or </s> or risk affecting every entry in the book after yours. If you make a lot of font changes, however, it can get very confusing trying to figure our how many closing tags you need. One way to reduce the number of tags is to combine the font tags into one long tag. For example the coding for this sprinkle ~*~ looks like this:

 ~ * ~ 

Notice how the font face is only in the first tag? But it shows up in the entire coding because only the font color is change for the little yellow star. Notice how the color for the star is closed, but there is a closure also at the end of the code? That closure is for the opening code. If you count, there are two opening font tags and two closing font tags.

Finally, many people use tables to make neat contained greetings. This whole page is done in tables. A real big caution with tables. Tags must be closed. If you leave your <table> tag without a </table> tag, the page will be nothing but a blank background in netscape. And since most people don't want or like to deal with finding the missing codes in tables, they are more than likely going to delete a broken table entry than try to fix it.

So here is a sample of a table greeting:

~*~*pad, pad*~*~You have been Party Sprinkled bya Quill from the Site Fights

~~pad, pad~~
You have been Party Sprinkled by
a Quill from the Site Fights