Parsing Guestbook Entries from /guestbooks/ELininger/guestbook.html Using Ruby

Personal guestbook pages like ELininger’s guestbook.html offer a fascinating glimpse into early web culture—where visitors left messages, greetings, and feedback in a publicly visible format. These pages often remain archived as static HTML, and can be programmatically parsed and preserved using Ruby.

Why Parse a Guestbook?

• Preserve personal web history for digital archiving
• Extract structured data for indexing or search
• Analyze sentiment, time patterns, or user locations

Step 1: Load and Parse the HTML

require 'nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'

url = "https://example.org/guestbooks/ELininger/guestbook.html"
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(URI.open(url))

Step 2: Target Each Entry Slot

Guestbook pages often have repeated patterns for each user entry. These can be wrapped in <div class="entry">, <p>, or table rows. Let’s assume each message follows a structured block.

doc.css('.entry').each do |slot|
  name = slot.at('.name')&.text
  date = slot.at('.date')&.text
  message = slot.at('.message')&.text

  puts "Name: #{name}"
  puts "Date: #{date}"
  puts "Message: #{message}"
  puts "-" * 30
end

Here, each .entry represents a content slot that contains a visitor’s submission—just like rows in a comment feed or review list.

Handling Legacy HTML

Older guestbook pages may not follow modern semantic HTML. They might use:

• Inline <font> and <br> tags
• Unlabeled text blocks instead of classes or IDs
• Non-standard encoding (e.g., ISO-8859-1)

To handle this, you can search by position, sibling elements, or regex if needed.

Bonus: Save Entries to CSV

require 'csv'

CSV.open(“guestbook_entries.csv”, “w”) do |csv|
csv << [“Name”, “Date”, “Message”]()