Yesterday, I received an email from R, who appreciated my contributions to the bearblog.dev platform. I felt bad that they had to dig two levels deep to find [email protected], which I use as a forwarding address. They asked my reasoning behind not having a guestbook or contact page. I replied that I wasn't sure how to manage such features and communicate effectively.
The inquiry, however, reignited my interest in building a guestbook system.
Today, I spent some time developing it using Cloudflare Workers. I utilized Cloudflare D1 to store entries and added a simple admin authentication and moderation system. Additionally, I implemented verification using Cloudflare Turnstile. Since I already rely on Cloudflare for various services, integrating their solutions for this project made perfect sense.
While the system is monolithic and still a work in progress, I’m pleased with the result. Even though I’m building it for my own use, I hope to refine it further and potentially create a starter script for others to self-host their guestbook.