Optimising queries

Hi!

I wonder if anyone can tell me if there is anything I can do to make
this set of queries a lot more efficient. Right now I have this code
that lists statistics as below:

Guestbook Statistics

Comments: 42 records

2003-06: 6
2003-07: 4
2003-08: 1
2003-09: 4
2003-10: 1
2003-11: 2
2003-12: 1

2003: 19
--------------------

2004-01: 1
2004-02: 1
2004-03: 3
2004-04: 1
2004-05: 1
2004-08: 3
2004-10: 1
2004-11: 1

2004: 12
--------------------

2005-01: 1
2005-03: 1
2005-06: 1
2005-07: 3
2005-08: 2

2005: 8
--------------------

2006-05: 3

2006: 3
--------------------

And the code that produced this is as follows:

"SELECT DISTINCT(SUBSTRING(entry, 1, 4)) AS years FROM guestbook ORDER
BY years ASC"

"SELECT COUNT(entry) AS total FROM guestbook WHERE entry LIKE '". $year
.. "%'";

"SELECT DISTINCT(SUBSTRING(entry, 1, 7)) AS months FROM guestbook WHERE
entry LIKE '" . $year . "%' ORDER BY months ASC"

"SELECT COUNT(entry) AS days FROM guestbook WHERE entry LIKE '".
$months . "%'"

I'd welcome any comments that might make this work a lot better. I
think what I've written is really crap and the network gets a bit
overloaded when I execute these queries.

Thanks for any advice offered.
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