One thing which may not be obvious to people is that you can't use Perl in all situations. Excuse me for pointing out that which is obvious to every monk here (I assume).

What do I mean? Well, for example, if your site is hosted with Geocities, you won't be able to run an executable on their server. (This may have changed, but I don't think so)

Of course, if you're running your own server, or if you have permission from the host to run a script, go wild. Otherwise, there's still hope: You can run the script on someone ELSE's server. There are places out there which offer guestbooks in this fashion for free. A google search will turn them up, I think. Again, sorry if this is known to you already, but I remember that when I was starting Perl, on my first day, I couldn't figure out why nothing happened when I clicked on my hello.pl file. (Nobody told me I had to INSTALL Perl... **blush**)