Google Sites Tutorial: Adding Comments and a Guestbook to Google Sites (2019)

In today’s video we’re gonna do another Google Sites tutorial this is going to be an advanced tutorial We’re going to be adding comments and a guestbook to Google Sites. So stay tuned Now I received a comment from Gary Smith on one of my other Advanced Google site tutorials and he asked can you make a video that shows how to include a real database not a spreadsheet On a Google site such as a guestbook or suggestions with the typical fields Now I did a lot of research on this and I looked online for guest books, found a bunch of HTML s and just went through a whole bunch of options. I really wanted to try to see what the best options were. And I’m going to show you three different options The first one is going to be a comment page showing you how to use the Google Form and the Google sheet Another one is how you can add comments to a blog post And another one is making a guestbook And all three of these are going to be using completely different software So let’s get started As you can see we’re on my demo site And the first one we’re going to do is I have it written down as a comment page But it could also be used for comments within a page. We’re going to be using Google Forms and Google sheets to create this Now the first thing you’re going to want to do is go over to your Google Drive Hit new go down to more and hit Google Forms And that’s where you’re going to create a form Now i’ve already gotten it started I put a cute little background up here by clicking on this right here to change the theme the header and background I’m not going to do a complete tutorial on Google Forms Otherwise this video is going to be really long. I named it guestbook and I basically only have two questions. I have a name with a short answer And comments with a long answer If you want to add more information you can do that. I also went ahead and put in a thank you here at the bottom When you do this you want to make sure you go into the responses As you can see, I’ve already played with it and tested it out You’re going to want to turn on accepting responses and if you click right here you can get email notification for responses and you can select this responses destination In this case, it’s going to be in a Google sheet Now one of the things I did do to make the Google sheet look a little better Is I stretch the dimensions out of each of the rows. I also made sure to cut off any extra columns Originally this said time code, I changed it to date And of course it says name and comment And I adjusted each of these so that they would look better on a web page Now, let’s see how you insert this The first thing we’re going to do is double click and hit from Drive That’s going to open up our Drive window to the side. I look for the form that I made, click on that and hit insert. Now there are several ways you can do this you can put your guestbook to one side and the responses to the other If you’re going to use a whole page or as comments under a whole blog post. You can stretch it out You want to make sure and stretch it out so it has plenty of room And you don’t end up with a scrollbar I’m going to also change the background to emphasis color Just to give it a bit more style Let’s see what that looks like Now that’s the guestbook where people can come in and sign up just under that we’re going to double click hit from drive again And this time we’re going to enter the spreadsheet that went with that form Then we’re going to click on it and we’re gonna drag it down You want to make sure and give that plenty of room so people can see it I’m going to select the background emphasis again To give it a more cohesive look Let’s see how that looks There we go, you have these sign in and you have the comments under it. And you’ll notice there’s no extra cells over here Now you can change the way that this looks directly in the Google sheet to make it look a little more nicer, if you want at different colors You can even insert an image or something Now most people are already familiar with using these two on a google site But I’m going to show you some other options Say you have a blog on your Google site And you want people to be able to comment on the blog post I have blog post title up here. This would be an example of a blog post page. And I put a little bit of words and a picture But down in here is where we want to allow them to comment To do this, we’re going to use a program called Disqus Disqus has been around for a while and pretty well-known A lot of people will even use it on WordPress sites The pricing from Disqus comes in several different sizes The Plus, The Pro and The Business But seeing as you’re using a Google site, you probably want the basic. It’s completely free but it does have ads Now I’m not really sure if the ads show up on your site, but they definitely advertise to you You just hit get started And it’ll let you sign up with Facebook, Twitter or Google Because I’m already signed up. I’m just going to go ahead and log in Now in the basic plan, I have a comments plug-in which can be used on WordPress advanced spam filters, moderation tool basic analytics, configurable ads and reactions Now this video is not going to be a complete tutorial on the software But once you get Disqus setup like you like it, you click installation You go down here And you click I don’t see my platform listed. So you’re going to install manually with the universal code. And this is the code you will be installing So you’re going to want to copy this Go back over to your site double click Hit embed and then go to embed code and this is where you’re going to paste that Now there are a few changes that you need to make on here before you go ahead and hit next One of the things you want to do is remove all this text right here It says recommend configuration variables You’re going to want to make sure to delete it all the way from the stars All the way to the backslash star If you scroll down a little bit more you have one more backslash star you need to take out Now the first thing you’re going to want to do is right here where it says this page URL You’re going to actually paste your URL into there So you highlight page URL and actually put your URL in there Now make sure to put these in single quotes Now directly below that you also have the page identifier Which is going to be the same You’re going to want to put a single quote Paste the URL and a single quote again You do not need to have the actual website address. So just go to the first backslash and take that off after that we go to next and hit insert Now you can stretch this out make it however you like I want it to go down below the blog post and stretch it down a bit further That way we have plenty of room to see the comments Now one of the things that you’ll want to do on the discuss website is set it so the most recent comment goes up here at the top Let’s take a look at how that’s going to look So we have our blog post And it says sign our guest book which you can change all that And it says start the discussion and I put H-E-L-L-O. How are you? Post as Diana, and there we go. And how this works depends on how you set it up on the Disqus site. Now this next one we’re going to do is the guestbook with flair I think this one is going to be actually the best option for those of you that don’t want comments But just once somewhere for people to sign in. To do this, we’re going to use a product called Padlet Now Padlet does have several options for school and for business as far as pricing But we’re just going to use it making the free board. You just click sign up. It’s free You can sign up with Google or sign up with Microsoft Now since I set up an account to test this already, I’m going to go ahead and log in Now with padlet you only can make three of these so this is not something you would want to use for comments on your blog, unless you upgraded to a paid plan To upgrade to the pro plan, it’s $8.25 a month. You get unlimited Padlets 250 megabytes and domain mapping And let’s go back to the free plan and get started making a guest book We’re going to click right here and hit make Padlet And the best one for a guestbook is this one here called stream. We’re going to select and it’s going to start making your Padlet Once you get here, you can rename your padlet. I’m going to call this one Guestbook And a description. I’m going to put please sign our guest book Please sign our guest book Then scroll down Down here in appearance, you can choose all kinds of different backgrounds I’m going to click over here go to textures and patterns And I think that one looks pretty good. That looks like a very nice wedding guest book You can also use solid colors, gradients and pictures and even add your own. You have 4 different choices of font. I’m going to go ahead and leave the first one. One of the things you want to make sure and do is have attribution This will tell you who is signing your guestbook The next one is the post position Do you want new posts at the first or new posts at the bottom? I’m going to leave the new posts at the top Do you want to allow visitors to comment on other people’s posts? This includes you. You can either turn that on or you can turn it off. For this demonstration. I’m going to go ahead and leave that off And the next one here is reactions You can have a like Vote up or down Star ,which is one to five star Or grade. I’m just gonna choose like. Now here’s where you can do the content filtering You can needed to have approval, which I’m not going to worry about You can also turn onto profanity filter Which is always recommended because you never know who’s going to find it After you’re done with that you’re going to click that and start posting Now this is basically what your guestbook is going to look like But there’s a couple more things we want to do before we put it on our site We’re going to go up here to Share And on the share page you can also change the privacy If you click Change privacy, you can have it on private. So it’s hidden from the public You can have it on password-protected that way only people with the password can do it Or you can do it on secret And you can have it completely public I’m going to keep this on secret because I only want it to show up to the people who are looking at the page that I put this on The visitor permissions Can read only But because it’s the guestbook we want them to write Can write and can edit which means they can edit other people’s post We’re going to leave this that can write Now that we check the privacy And we have it at secret and write We’re going to go down here and put embed in blog or your website Click that I’m going to copy the code Jump back over to my demo site double click hit embed embed code and paste I’ll hit next and Insert Now I’m going to want to stretch that over And again, stretch it down to make sure there’s plenty of room for people to sign I like to stretch it just down here to where it’s below the plus sign maybe a little bit longer I’m going to go to the side here use a different background And now, let’s take a look how that looks So when people come to our guestbook, This is what they’re going to see They’ll see the beautiful padlet here. It says guestbook. Please sign our guest book. And they can click here put in a title and write something They can also upload files add a link add a picture and a whole lot more Now, I’ve not played with Padlet enough to know how to turn all these on and off So you may want to be aware of this before you put this on your website Now once I have that in there, I can just click away and that’s on the website Now as the guest book owner you can go in and delete these And you’ll probably also want to turn on notifications to see who’e writing on it. I hope this answered your question Gary. if anyone else has a question about how to do something, be sure and drop it in the comments because I do read through them and I always respond I hope you found this video helpful. If you like videos like this, make sure and subscribe to my channel. Thanks for watching and we’ll see you next week

Written by Michelle Gutierrez

5 comments