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QuickerSite is available on GitHub as from 2020.
You may want to star, fork, follow, download and/or contribute to the project over there. Thank you!
Google Sites is getting somewhere! Google gave it a big update this summer. It's definitely worth to take a closer look. So far I have created 3 sites with Google Sites. One of them is my band's site.
Pro's:
- 100% ad-free all-in-one hosting solution
- Use your own domain (multiple domains are possible)
- Sitesearch included by default
- GDPR-compatible cookiewarning
- Google analytics-ready
- Easy to add a favicon, logo and branding
- Various header& footer-options and sticky topmenu
- Scroll-to-top icon
- Very userfriendly and complete text and image editing
- Intuitive placement of any element on a page, keeping it 100% responsive
- Pretty nice mobile hamburger menu (slide-in)
- Neatless integration with all other Google products, like Youtube, Forms, Docs, Maps, etc
- Easily add multiple editors for a given site or hand over its ownership
- I expect a Google site to be SEO-optimized?
- Free SSL certificate included
- Forgot to mention: it's all free, free, free!
Cons:
- Images are not automatically resized/optimized for the web. Therefore sometimes images are loading too slow, causing a page to act weird before it's completely loaded.
- I also miss a lightbox-plugin for images
- No one-click add-ons like e-commerce, intranets, forum-plugins. Google sites are quite "basic". There is a way to embed any HTML-snippet though.
- Not possible to develop plugins for your site
- Very limited templating-capabilities. All you can play with are some colors, images, font-families and font-sizes.
All in all, I think Google beats Mobirise in some domains, especially when it comes to placement of elements. Mobirise is to limited when it comes to placing elements on a page. Especially Google's text-editor is pretty complete. Mobirise adds more beauty, whistles and bells out of the box though.
I often receive messages like the ones below. It's striking how many of us classic ASP developers share the same feeling. Left alone in the woods with our ASP-scripts and functions that passed the test of time (some of them are working flawlessly for 25 years now, on all Windows Servers).
I like your work! Contrary to what the muppets say, Classic ASP is not dead. There is nothing that one cannot do with ASP. In fact I have written desktop applications in ASP... cannot do that with PHP. You may recall SOOP? It had a huge following and a lot of devs for a lot of useful plugins. Not sure what happened with that even though I was one their plugin devs. Perhaps it was the cost of web hosting vs Apache servers and WordPress. Good luck with your CMS.
I've just found your web site for the first time today and I just wanted to say thank you for doing it. I've been using Classic ASP since the late 90s and still use it today for projects even though I've been jeered and sneered at for doing so. It's great to see there are other people still out there using it for real and still flying the flag :0)
I found your page by chance, because I was looking for something in ASP that would work with the "DataTables | Table plugin for jQuery"... congratulations for maintaining this site. Hope you are still working with ASP...thanks.
After struggling for months with this, years actually, I will try come up with a mobile first web application that takes care of the various playlists I go through as a live performer. Below the first brainstorm of the datamodel.
A user can manage multiple bands. The user can add songs (by artists) to both playlists and rehearsals. At the gig, the musicians can download lyrics, chords, scores related to the song to be played.
Songs can have multiple genres, a language, an "ambiance" and a duration, so that it is very easy to generate playlists based on specific requirements, like "lets start and end heavy", or by timing-constraints.
This is only a very early idea. I welcome all suggestions!
- nick6352683@yahoo.com says: (29/08/2023 01:24:50)There are so many questions that need to be answered before even deciding how to proceed. That said, the data structure is the most important, and getting that right is probably the important foundation of the entire project. That said, in my opinion the data lacks some items, and some items can be streamlined. I'm sure we are going for multiple rounds on this, so here we go with round one:
Please also note that I have only thought about this for only 10-15 minutes and not days/months...
Data Structure:
1. Is each Artist supposed to have full data access - meaning will each one be able to manipulate the data (add/edit/delete)? If this is the case, there are some serious issues here, you will need to have elaborate User Permissions scheme, and by just looking at the database you created, there is none - yet.
2. Depending on the technology to be used to create the project (more on this later), you can streamline the table a little bit, for example you can get rid of the Artists table, and include the Artists in the Band table. HOWEVER, because different bands have different Artists, you will need a "Repeater Field", where you can add any number of Artists. An example of a Repeater field is an invoicing app, where you can keep adding as many items to it as you want.
3. With the Repeater field you can also get rid of the Playlist Song table and merge that with the Playlist table.
4. Likewise, you can have a Radio button for the Playlist table to decide whether the playlist is for rehearsal, gig or both, and depending on the choice(s), you will then have fields to add their corresponding details (name, date, time, etc...)... - nick6352683@yahoo.com says: (29/08/2023 01:25:29)Technology:
You really have 4 main choices here:
1. Are you trying to build this from scratch, ie: a complete standalone app, or even build it on top of CMS like QuickerSite? Besides the main data functions, you will need User Permissions functions, as well as templating and almost most important, a filtering system to display the data depending the users input, Language, Genre, Time, Band, Playlist, etc...
2. If you are willing to spend a few hundred dollars a year, you can speed up production time with ASP/PHP/.NET Runner, or ASP/PHP/.NET Maker. However, the front display you will get out of the box will look more like a database app., as oppose to a professional website.
3. Third choice (and you will hate this!!!), you can use WordPress with Advanced Custom Pields Pro plugin, and a Full Site Editing Theme. A FSE theme is basically a theme with a JSTemplate/Artisteer like features built in. Once done and packaged the theme after development, you can take the 2 zip files, the plugin and theme to any website, and right away start adding the data right away. Also, you will have elaborate filtering system, User Permissions system, no coding templating system, the choice of front end and/or backend editing, and a fast professional looking site, that will perform in about 0.5/1 second after all said and done..., BUT with a free third party Cache plugin the pages will load immediately, and I mean immediately. You can also decide what piece of info can be seen on the front end, and what is just for backend stuff, like Rehearsal dates, and Playlists, etc...
4. Finally, have AI code for you. I tried many of them, and when it comes to coding, unless it's something very simple they all suck, ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot (which is ChatGPT btw...), Bart, Perplexity AI, etc... maybe in a few years or so...
If you build this with php, you can possibly find some band managers to sell this to, or to bands as a software as a service type of a site which you will have to create and maintain, and getting rid of the multiple bands feature and make it for one band, then you target market will be individual bands, which is a much bigger marketplace. - Pieter says: (29/08/2023 11:29:58)Nick, awesome!
1. Sure we need security and permissions. The main key-issue is how to give permissions to band-members. Some band-members may not have access to some playlists. Others can see all playlists. I would stick to one main user for editing/adding/removing x-number of bands. The solution should be able to hold an unlimited number of users though (a bit like QuickerServer held an unlimited number of QuickerSites).
2. I plan to build this on top of ASPlite, the classic ASP developer framework I have been working on for some years. So yeah baby, it's gonna be classic ASP and nothing else. For front-end I'd use Bootstrap and a bunch of jQuery plugins (DataTables, CKEditor, JSZip, jQuery UI, etc.)
3. I am not thinking about selling it at this point. To be honest, I need this for myself in the first place. I make money doing gigs these days. So if this would help me to organiser my "job", I'm sure it's gonna help some other musicians too. At this point I'm not sure about redistributing code though... I guess I'd better offer this as a hosted service... What do you think?
4. I have used ACF in WordPress before. It's an amazing app. But the underlying datastructure is terrible, which is a big issue as soon as you're dealing with 100.000's of records. Things get too slow. Pages take >3 seconds to load as as you start using this app the tough way.
5. I stay away from AI at this point. I'm the craftworker-type of developer. I believe those final 10-15% of finishing touches in an application often make a big difference. You never get these with codebuilders, AI or application-generators. - nick6352683@yahoo.com says: (31/08/2023 07:41:41)Sorry for the delay, you are absolutely correct about slow queries when you have 100k records, and with ACF you can reach that many records in a relatively short time, if you have to many fields and too many tables (in WP language: too many Custom Fields and too many Custom Post Types). And when you have queries a cache will not help you. The reason is that the data of each custom field in WP is not stored in the same record as the post, but in a separate table and each custom occupies 2 records per post.
For example. in a regular database if you have 5000 records in a table for posts, and it does not matter how many fields, you will end up with 5000 records.
Now, let's take an example of a Real Estate project where you will have 25 fields to hold various data regarding each property, (address, price, size, amenities, etc...). and lets assume the same amount of records from above, 5000 posts: In WP you will end up with:
- 5000 records for the post, and,
- 25 x 2 x 5000 = 50,000 records for the custom fields,
Giving you a grand total of 55,000 records as oppose to the just 5,000.
A non shared hosting will help you a bit, but still the delay in your filter queries will be noticeable.
HOWEVER, there are 2 plugins that I know of, one is a commercial plugin from Australia, and a free one at wordpress.org, that will change how custom fields are saved, and will use a separate table and save all the data in one row, so you will end up in this case with just 5,000 records.
The info to the problem and solution is here - https://www.awesomeacf.com/storing-acf-data-custom-database-tables/ and the actual plugin page is found here: https://hookturn.io/downloads/acf-custom-database-tables/
Just remember this, there must be a reason why WP now runs over 40% of the entire Internet. For large busy sites for me the issue is money, since each mysql database can only handle about 150 concurrent connections, the actual reported number though is more close to 120. Getting the commercial version of the database which is owned by Oracle, was $32,000/year when I last checked in 2012, which apparently can handle 32,000 concurrent connections. The other choices are using Oracle, which now we are talking about quarter of a million per year, or cloud hosting, where you will be using multiple databases and need database load balancing schemes, which I'm guessing that the hosting companies will do that now.
I'll have more over the weekend, I will be out the next 2 days... - nick6352683@yahoo.com says: (31/08/2023 07:47:41)I just realized my calculations above were WAY off (long day). Let me try again:
-5000 records for the posts, and for the custom fields,
- 25 x 2 x 5,000 = 250,000
Grand Total = 255,000 records for 5k posts with each post having only 25 custom fields.
P.S. Don't call me Joe Biden yet, I caught my mistake on time !!! - nick6352683@yahoo.com says: (31/08/2023 07:54:28)Forgot to mention, the free plugin is at https://wordpress.org/plugins/acf-to-custom-database-tables/
- Pieter says: (04/09/2023 16:19:19)Sorry for the delay Nick. If your calculations are correct, I don't think ACF is a serious option... such an outrageous database overhead. Also, I don't feel very safe with a custom plugin, fixing another custom plugins mess, inside a WP that itself is also changing direction every now and then... No offense, but this does not work for me.
I think I'm gonna go for the datamodel attached. I added band members and user-languages for the interface. I will keep you posted. Many thanks again buddy! So happy to hear from you again!
I feel bored lately. Live example.
Once again, Google has blown me away (it still is... no idea where this will land actually). Never heared of it, until yesterday. Google's Material Design. Material Design is Google's open source design system for Android, iOS, Flutter, and the Web. On a side note, the implementation for the Web isn't ready yet. I can't wait for that to happen though.
I came accross Material when searching for open source icons. As much as I like Font Awesome for pioneering this area, it looks like they got far behind on the competition.
I was thinking, there must be an alternative to Font Awesome. That's how I found Google's Material Symbols. 2875 open source icons, free to use (compared to only 675 in Font Awesome 4.7.0.)
All it takes is:
Because I was busy doing QS-stuff anyway, I gave this a whirl:
Even though this feels like restoring an oldtimer by repainting it, you have to admit... it makes QS look a little less 90's. And on top of that, I got rid of 68 ugly gifs in the QuickerSite codebase. Cheers on that!
This feature is available in the lateste codebase (not released yet) on GitHub.
I've made a small cosmetical change to QS. The changes are available on GitHub. The only files that changed are /asp/includes/javascript.asp (needed) and some more in the /asp folder (but you don't really need those).
I have used some more padding, a less agressive border-color and rounded borders for text-boxes, selectboxes and textareas. This affects both the backsite and some modules in the front (forms, polls, myprofile, guestbooks, etc). It somehow makes QS look a little less nineteeny I think. Hope you like!
It sounds like a wrong idea to even search for and use it. But it's not. I'm hosting both pietercooreman.be and asplite.com on 100% free static website hosting for 3 years now. On GitHub pages. GitHub pages offers pure static website hosting (no server-side scripts allowed) for each and every project you have on GitHub. SSL is included for free as well!
Two minor limitations
- Published GitHub Pages sites may be no larger than 1 GB
- GitHub Pages sites have a soft bandwidth limit of 100 GB per month.
I admit, I've become a big fan of GitHub pages, pretty much like I've become a fan of static websites builders like Mobirise and Nicepage. Or Bootstrap if you like to handcode your own. Combined with some embedded widgets, you're all set. Check out this list of popular website widgets. Why would you still need a CMS today? And what happened to Webmatrix, the most intuitive web development IDE that MicroSoft ever built? Why was it replaced by Visual Studio Code, the darkest and most depressing code editor ever?
You find a lot of tutorials on how to use GitHub pages. Check them out!
- David says: (10/05/2023 08:24:59)Very handy resource, I've had a GitHub account for a while now but really only use it for pushing my local codebases to their respective repositories.
I host static sites on Netlify, and these in turn are automatically updated from Github. Netlify has a very generous free tier, including ID, Forms, File Uploads, and a basic CMS. For static site hosting and DNS management, it's hard to go past Netlify.
Update: the solution discussed below is generating CORS errors in JavaScript. Long story short, you need to allow CORS in IIS.
While VBScript is equipped with asynchronous components (httprequests, shell), when using them in ASP they're always synchronous. Classic ASP does not support asynchronous calls whatsoever. Classic ASP follows a strict set of sequences, which means that operations are performed one at a time, in perfect order, top to bottom.
Why would you need or use async calls in ASP? Imagine you want to run a véry long process after clicking a button: generate 10000 documents, or send out 10000 emails... This is not something you want the visitor to wait for. These things can take many hours.
There is a way around this limitation though. The solution: AJAX calls. Rather than perform async calls serverside, you can let AJAX do the job. AJAX calls are always asynchronous. The browser will never wait for an AJAX call to finish when loading or browsing away from pages.
However... Imagine you're browsing www.quickersite.com. You click a button that loads www.quickersite.com/ajax through AJAX. If www.quickersite.com/ajax takes 10 minutes to finish, your browser will wait 10 minutes before you'll be able to further browse www.quickersite.com. This is not what we want. We somehow shift the problem from the server to the browser.
There is a way around this. Instead of loading www.quickersite.com/ajax, you can load ajax.quickersite.com. Browsers assume that www.quickersite.com and ajax.quickersite.com are two different websites. Loading ajax.quickersite.com will not block visitors on www.quickersite.com whatsoever. Problem solved.
Be careful though. When calling ajax.quickersite.com, you cannot rely on the cookies/sessions/application/security you have on www.quickersite.com. You have to program your way around that shortcoming by making sure there are no security-risks when loading external urls. You may need passwords or tokens to ensure that urls load only once, or load only under specific circumstances.
There is another thing to keep in mind when using ASP for long processes, like sending out 10000 emails. Make sure to set Server.ScriptTimeout to a large number (default is 90 seconds). There is no (documented) maximum value. You may want to set it to 10800 in specific circumstances, allowing an ASP page script to run for 3 hours.
The bigger issue is though: is it a good idea to let an ASP page run, unattended, unmonitored, disconnected from the browser... for hours? Maybe not... or maybe not always. ASP pages are not designed to run eternally, that's for sure. IIS can - at any time - reload applications, be reset, or simply crash a site when it eats too much memory, just to name something. In some cases though, where pages are running for few minutes only - or do not need loads of memory - this is a legitimate workaround. I have used this technique several times with success.
Some sites report that classic ASP is "end of life". The funny thing about this is, these are articles written between 5 and 10 years ago. Even Wikipedia reports that "ASP was supported until 14 January 2020 on Windows 7."
This is fake news. There is no official EOL policy for classic ASP. As from IIS7, classic ASP is implemented as an ISAPI filter in IIS, configured to kick-in ASP.DLL as soon as an *.asp file is requested. It's therefore more accurate to say: classic ASP will be supported as long as IIS supports ISAPI-filtering. Or even better: the end-of-life of classic ASP is inseperable from the end-of-life of IIS itself. That will be the day MicroSoft pulls the plug on its Server-products.
Same story for VBScript. VBScript is as dead as ASP, but it's actually a (default) part of Windows Script Host (wscript.exe). Again, there is not a single reason to believe that VBScript will no longer be supported in WSH in the future. WSH is part of the Microsoft Windows Operating System ever since ... Windows 95.
Both classic ASP and VBScript are underlying technologies. ASP is a toolset for web developers. VBScript is a visual programming language. Other services and softwares depend on them (both MicroSoft and non-MicroSoft). They're not to be confused with end-user products that need security-fixing, updates, support, legal follow-up, etc. Classic ASP nor VBScript are even included in the "Microsoft Products and Services" lifecycle database. IIS is included though. It follows the Component Lifecycle Policy, meaning that it's supported as long as the product where it's a component of is supported. That is the Windows Server family.
Therefore, I truly believe that classic ASP and VBScript will be available in Windows OS for at least another 10-15 years, probably longer. Nobody knows what happens next. This is also true for any other technology you'd use today. So there is not a single reason to not consider classic ASP/VBScript to develop web applications. I can tell. I'm still doing so. And I love it. As long as someone is coding ASP/VBScript, it's alive. I must admit however that I'm more and more feeling lonely. It appears that most web developers don't even know what classic ASP exactly is/was. I'm trying to turn the tide. But that will never work on my own...
The problem: by default classic ASP developers face a 200kB (200000 Bytes) upload limit in IIS Express. Unlike in IIS5-11, IIS Express has no GUI-way to configure this value.
IIS Express is available as a development-host in various MicroSoft IDE's like Visual Code and Visual Studio. I use it in Webmatrix, an IDE that MicroSoft decided to stop developing some years ago, but still available on my 7 year old laptop.
The solution: change the ASP limits for maxRequestEntityAllowed in
C:\Users\XXXX\Documents\IISExpress\config\applicationhost.config
Search for "<asp ". Change the entry to:
The maximum value for is maxRequestEntityAllowed is 2147483647 (integer / 2GB). But in my experience the real upload limitation in classic ASP is 100MB approximately. When uploading larger files, I get a "Microsoft Cursor Engine error '8007000e' - out of memory"-error.
Not only will this enable uploading larger files. It will also allow to submit large datasets to urls (in an ajax call for instance).
You can read more about the ASP limitations in IIS here.
- JohnW says: (10/04/2023 15:48:41)Have you tried editing Classic ASP with the current version of Visual Studio. It doesn't seem to like 32 bit. If you try to connect to a 32 bit ODBC source (ie Access JET) you can't. If you start IIS Express you find that you can't use 32 bit COM objects. I haven't a way around this, although I've always primarily used a local installation of "proper" IIS as my dev server so I haven't looked very hard.
I liked WebMatrix a lot more than I like VS Code - Pieter says: (11/04/2023 13:53:01)John, you're right. I just tested QS in Visual Studio Code and it does not work. Visual Studio Code comes with a few IIS Express plugins. They seem to be non-MicroSoft-managed though. They are configured to disable 32bit com. Exit Visual Studio Code... never liked it anyway.
In Visual Studio 2017 you could configure IIS Express to enable 32bits, under Tools/Options/Projects and solutions/Web projects. Not sure about more recent versions of Visual Studio.
But the thing is, classic ASP developers are stuck with Notepad++ when it comes to coding. I like that editor. It's not only free, it's extremely fast and powerful. You can easily search for anything particular in 100's of 1000's of files. Try that with with any MS-product... It also has some basic classic ASP syntax highlighting. It's got all you need. - JohnW says: (11/04/2023 20:27:40)Yes, that setting is still there in VS 2022 in Projects and Solutions/Web Projects. I don't know if I'd have found it buried there if you hadn't told me where to look, so cheers for that
I've used Notepad++ before but my text editor of choice is EditPlus. It also has good syntax highlighting and a global search function, along with built in FTP/SFTP, integration with Git and an editable clip text directory, so you can add things like "Set objConn = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Connection "). It costs a few dollars which I'm happy to pay.
Have you ever tried using MySQL as a backend for QS or aspLite - it works pretty well with Classic ASP? - Pieter says: (12/04/2023 12:46:05)I have never considered to use MySQL with classic ASP as the driver is basically ODBC. When using Access, you can use OLEDB drivers. OLEDB is much faster with Access. And also, as soon as you use MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL or any other DMBS, you're facing high RAM usage from the first database you host. Access does not use RAM. You can have an unlimited number of Access databases without using 1MB of RAM. And as Access is basically a flat-file-based DBMS, Access databases can easily be backupped and restored.
That said, connecting to a MySQL database in classic ASP is as easy as:
dim db : Set db = Server.Createobject("ADODB.Connection")
db.Open "Driver={MySQL ODBC 8.0 Unicode Driver};Server=127.0.0.1;Port=3306;Database=XXX;User=YYY;Password=ZZZ;Option=3;"
where XXX=database name, YYY=username, ZZZ=password
This requires the "MySQL ODBC 8.0 Unicode Driver" installed on your Windows OS. They can be downloaded here: https://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/odbc/
For a customer I recently setup an easy way to create PDF flyers. They had to be printable in various formats (ie: A5, A4, A3). ChromeASP turned out to be a lifesaver once again.
This is what I was able to deliver with ChromeASP. Behind the scenes, a basic HTML-file gets converted to PDF with ChromeASP. Live example: http://pdf.asplite.com/ (test 5). Even though I use a good old table driven design, it's still possible to have all sorts of objects (like the QS logo) float anywhere you like.
As Chrome (headless) is creating the PDF files, there are absolutely no limits when it comes to HTML/CSS/JavaScript support. Chrome simply supports it ALL, and how! Chrome even automatically fixes all sorts of errors and inconsistencies in your html. Even the most powerful and well known PHP PDF-libraries are looking at headless Chrome as their unbeatable successor. No way you can compete with Google. Google has always created the best softwares around (Search, Android, Chrome, Youtube, Gmail, Drive, Photos, Ads,…. )
Google (the open-source Chromium-community that is) is currently completely refactoring headless Chrome. I am silently hoping in the future headless Chrome could also be used to easily (un)zip files and folders, create all sorts of binaries, easily edit pictures, etc. from within a classic ASP application. This would be a big thing and – sadly – take lots of open source projects down. But for once classic ASP developers would be able to shine again. Let’s pray for that. Amen.
In my search for a mobilefriendly email template to use in QuickerSite, I quickly realized that most designers stick to a table-driven setup, even in 2023. Unlike most browsers, some email readers are ridiculously outdated. Outlook 2003, 2010 or Outlook Express... remember ? They're still in use though.
For QuickerSite, this template is about the most basic mobile-friendly email template I could come up with.
This is how it shows on my mobile phone:
and this is how Gmail displays it on a Windows laptop:
It acts responsive, right? And it's pretty readable in both cases. I do not specify a default font-size. I have seen some designers set a default font-size of 13px. I don't think that's necessary, but it looks like that's a good font size on both large and small screens.
Anyway... happy to be able to send mobilefriendly newsletters in QS... after all :)
