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:
Cons:
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!
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
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!
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.
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 :)
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