UPDATE: it turns out that AWS as well throttles port 25 in case many emails are sent at once (like is usually the case when sending out newsletters). You can ask AWS support to lift that throttle though...

A while back I was very excited about Google Cloud. Remember? Well, it’s over. Google Cloud Servers block outgoing port 25, meaning that you cannot run an SMTP service on that port. So there is absolutely no way to host websites (with contact forms, or any other forms) on a Google Cloud server. Exit Google Cloud.

So I had to go find another solution. I decided to give Amazon Web Services a try. Check out https://aws.amazon.com/

So far so good. I’m very impressed. Things are a bit more complex coming from Google Cloud, but that has its reasons. AWS has a longer tradition in cloud hosting. It feels like they have been thinking a lot about it over the years. They do cloud hosting the object oriënted way... Sort of. 

Some things to keep in mind when using AWS:

• Make sure to use one the datacenters that has AWS backup available. At this time it’s only available to 4 of the many datacenters they have. I choose Ireland.
• You can make use of their so called “Free Tier” offers. That basically means you pay nothing in the first 12 months. Google has something similar. You can have a Windows 2019 with 30GB of disk space and 1GB of RAM for free… That sounds like a ridiculously small server, but believe me, it works very well. You can easily host up to 30 (small) QuickerSites on such an instance. Not bad at all. After the free period has expired, that server would only cost at around 15€/month. Not bad either. And of course, you can easily upgrade that machine with more CPU, RAM and disk space any time.
• The AWS backup solution fully automates the creation of snapshots (backups) at very low rates. Very useful, but again, only available to a handful of their datacenters…
• Getting started with such an AWS instance requires some in-depth understanding of how firewalls work, how to install IIS, an SMTP server, assign IP addresses, and many other things… Sometimes I feel like it’s too much for my small brains. But I managed to get it up and running rather quickly. I amazed myself.
• It’s good to know that QuickerSite works – without a single problem – on the latest Windows 2019 Server. It’s funny to read how some ASP.NET applications are stuck with IIS 6 or 7 due to lacking support for older ASP.NET versions on the newer IIS releases. Véééry funny actually. I can tell for sure that QuickerSite runs on - hold on - Windows 2000 (IIS5), 2003 (IIS6), 2008 (IIS7), 2012 (IIS8), 2016 (IIS10) and 2019 (also IIS10 - huh? they forgot to make it 11 I guess) servers. Bam...

All in all, I think AWS is a very interesting way to go. I will make up my mind about it very soon.

For years I have successfully used the SQLOLEDB-provider when connecting to SQL Server databases in classic ASP. However, for some weeks now, I face serious issues with it. I get random "Login timeout expired" errors and sudden crashes. No way to reproduce or predict these errors. It was driving me crazy.

But it looks like I found a solution. As soon as I started to use Provider=SQLNCLI11 in asp/classes/database.asp the error has gone. Quite a relieve as at some point I got 1000's of error messages. 

This issue does not show in Access. So if you're using QS on an Access database, you can ignore this fix. But if you happen to use SQL Server, you may want to change the provider from SQLOLEDB to SQLNCLI11 in asp/classes/database.asp. 

I use the SQL Server Express editions. Maybe the issue only shows on Express editions. I have no clue. 

Hope this helps.

Ok, we’re back and free again. Why? Let’s face it: the CMS game has changed. Even all free CMS’s like WP, Joomla and Drupal face hard times. Social media have taken over big parts of classic “content” management. I see the same struggle for life in many other CMS-related sofware like template-builders and CMS plugin-developers. Many of them simply disappear at some point in time.

In this global context, selling web-publishing software is impossible. It’s even very difficult to promote free software, especially when it’s developed in a dead language (classic ASP) and when it requires some technical know-how to get it up and running.

So I do not expect to welcome 100’s of users, but I spent about 10 years of my life building this application, so why not share that with whoever can use it?

To all those who paid for QuickerSite in the past 10 years, I can only say THANK YOU!! You kept QuickerSite alive.

As for the future of QuickerSite, let’s not get too excited… There is no active community of classic ASP developers out there. Everyone moved to PHP. But there still are some. And they may prefer classic ASP to any other technology. 

For me personally things have changed as well. In the past few years I actively tried to make it as a country singer songwriter (Pete Corman). I had an amazing time. I met lots of musicians and I played a lot of concerts and festivals. I even made it to our national "The Voice" edition with a Chris Young song. As a matter of fact, this sure has become some sort of second life, and I will keep on writing and singing as much as I can.

But I recently got into coding again, JavaScript mainly. And I love it. So I’m back. And QS is back. I do not prepare new versions however. I will only fix bugs and issues as they are raised.

So, to all those users who asked me to make QuickerSite free again, and to all customers who backed this project by paying license fees: let's get together again, and let's try to make something out of this. Maybe one day QuickerSite 5 rises up and puts classic ASP back on the map.

QuickerSite is all about classic ASP & VBScript, Microsoft's popular scripting languages back in 97-2004. My recent JavaScript crash-courses have learned me 2 things: First, VBScript/ASP is very visual. It's much easier to read and write (case insensitve) than JavaScript or C# (case sensitive, and too often very short and visually confusing syntax). Second: JavaScript is the way to go. Both on the client and on the server. And in between (AJAX). But as a server-side technology, ASP/VBScript still does amazingly well. On Windows servers it does better than PHP. It's faster in any case. As a matter of fact, classic ASP is STILL very capable of doing about everything you'd ever need as a (back-end) web developer: databases, files, program flow, object oriented programming, etc. I have recently come accross very useful libraries to parse and update JSON files in classic ASP. But over the years, I have also often extended my classic ASP projects with some PHP libraries to create PDF files. QuickerSite also uses a .NET image-resizer. Microsoft servers run about any web technology. That is a plus I think.

Welcome back. See you in the forums.

This is what you get when searching for "Chrome" in Bing:

Next, MS tries very hard to prevent you from downloading Chrome in Edge by blocking downloads from Google.com. Microsoft should be ashamed of itself :)

My JavaScript crash courses over the past few weeks are paying off already. Tonight, I was asked to include a JSON calendar for a website I host for quite a while now.

I took the challenge and I was succesful with the script below:

<script>
var x;
var xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
xmlhttp.[onreadystatechange] = function() {
    if (this.readyState == 4 && this.status == 200) {
        var myObj = JSON.parse(this.responseText);

for(var i = 0; i < myObj.data.length; i++) {
    var obj = myObj.data[i];

x=x+ "<tr>";
x=x+ "<td>" + obj.date.dayName + " " + obj.date.day + "/" + obj.date.month + "/" + obj.date.year + "</td>";
x=x+ "<td colspan=3><strong>" + obj.eventName + "</strong>";

if (obj.tickets != null ) {
x=x+ " - <strong><a target='_blank' style='color:#F49021' href='" + obj.tickets.url + "'>tickets</a></strong>"

};

x=x+ "</td></tr>"
x=x+ "<tr><td style='font-size:0.8em'>("+  obj.performanceTime + ")</td>";
x=x+ "<td>" + obj.venue.name + " - " + obj.venue.street + " - " + obj.venue.city + " (" + obj.venue.countryCode + ")</td></tr>";
x=x+ "<tr><td style='height:20px'> </td></tr>";

}

document.getElementById("demo").innerHTML = "<table cellpadding=5 border=0>" + x.replace("undefined","") + "</table>";
    }
};
xmlhttp.open("GET", "/storeJSON.asp", true);
xmlhttp.send();

</script>
<div id="demo"> </div>

The most important line is xmlhttp.open("GET", "/storeJSON.asp", true);
The actual JSON is NOT located on that particular website. It rarely is. JSON is made to transfer data from site to site, server to server. But my storeJSON.asp looks like this:

<%

dim aj_XmlHttp,inputsource
Set aj_XmlHttp = CreateObject("Msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP")
aj_XmlHttp.open "GET", "https://XXXXXXXXXXXXX", False
aj_XmlHttp.setRequestHeader "Content-Type", "text/json"
aj_XmlHttp.setRequestHeader "CharSet", "UTF-8"
aj_XmlHttp.Send
inputsource = aj_XmlHttp.responseText
set aj_XmlHttp = Nothing

response.write inputsource

%>

where XXXXXXXXXXXXX is the actual URL with JSON data to be parsed. UC? Handy. And even though the big load is on the client here, the actual JSON-URL is not exposed in the browser. Oh btw, it's all about this page.

I was told Google ranks non-SSL sites lower and it's gonna mark them as unsafe pretty soon (May 2018). This year will be the point of no return. Every website needs an SSL certificate, Google says.

This is going to be a game changer. Take Godaddy. They offer dirt cheap hosting, somewhere between 3 and 4 $/month. But they charge 6$/month for a certificate alone. One.com is smarter. They include SSL in their cheapest solutions. It's not even an option there. 

I'm not sure about this. I'm in this business for some decades now. Never ever a QS backsite password got burned due to unsafe networks. QS uses encrypted cookies by itself. 

Also, validating an SSL often needs a lot of website-tweaking and fixing. I spent all night just to tweak this (rather small) website alone. Everywhere I used images and iframes pointing to "unsafe" http://-sources, my page was marked "unsafe" as well. I had to replace dozens of lines of html code. But I host 100's of websites. Go figure...

As much as I like Google - and who am I in the end - I think we're going a bit too fast here. There is not a single reason to secure 5 page business-card-kind-a-websites with little or no interaction with the visitor, other than clicking around a little. Not a single reason. There is no sensitive data whatsoever going back and forth. My 2 cents.

Anyway, www.quickersite.com is on SSL as from today. Please report any issue. Many thanks.

You know, I'm a Google fan. I really like many of their products, like gmail, calendar, drive, docs, etc.

 A little hour ago, I setup a Google Cloud Server (https://cloud.google.com) and I'm already hosting a QS demo site on a Windows 2016 Data Center Edition. There was not 1 issue, and I have the feeling the entire process is automated with no human interventions whatsoever. And I have a FULL YEAR to test this thing, for FREE. And even if I would signup for the paid version, I would pay not even 25% of what I pay now.

I like that.

Btw, not only you can deploy all sorts of servers, you can also deploy 100's of applications (CMS, e-Commerce) via the Cloud Launcher, each time calculating their price. I wonder what it would take to get QS on their list !

I recently discovered an HTML5 element I had never heared of: the HTML Canvas. I dived into this because I'm a teacher in web programming nowadays and I needed a fun way to learn coding. The HTML Canvas element is perfect for the job. I'm working on a new website about the topic. Make sure to check it out. Hope you get as excited as I am about this.

Below one of my scripts. There is no video, jpg or gif involved here. It's 100% pure JavaScript and HTML. Check out the html/javascript source! 

Forget EVERYTHING you've ever learned about SEO. It's over.

Create a Google Business. It's all you need to show up first in the Google results.

After my pessimistic post about Microsoft's dumping Webmatrix few days ago, I needed some positive vibes. And what happens? Mobirise releases v3! 

I admit. I am a fan of this thing from day 1. If you want to impress customers with a stunning - mobile first - web design, use Mobirise. Get a grip on it. It's not even that complicated. As a matter of fact, it's ridiculously simple.

Slides, galleries, background videos, sticky header, mobile menus, numerous predefined text blocks and image/video positions, social media integration... You name it, you got it. And it's all free. 

It's still possible to use QuickerSite in combination with Mobirise. But in all honesty, the added value of QS is being reduced with every new version they release. The things I would typically keep on using QS for is the intranet (multi-user), the forms, the web based approach (rather than using a PC tool). But ... to be very honest, I am no longer convinced that web based content management is the only way to go. Many of the QuickerSites I host can easily be managed with a tool like Mobirise. Many of my customers do not change their site very often anyway. Why not use Mobirise for these sites? On top of that, Mobirise exports html files only. They do not require any resources on the server.

I shoot myself in the foot again. I know. But that is because if I don't, somebody will shoot me in the back anyway. As sad as I was because of Microsoft dumping Webmatrix, as excited I am now about Mobirise. Give this tool a try. It's groundbreaking.

Webmatrix is dead. Development of Webmatrix, the all-in-one web development IDE has stopped. That is after the Visual Studio Express editions got buried as well. MS now suggests to use "VS Code" instead. I downloaded it. Gave it a try. I don't get it. Notepad++ is a much better code editor. And it is Open Source as well. Microsoft has lost the war on web development many years ago. Nobody cares about what MS is developing or suggesting anymore. That is painfully clear, except to the Microsoft developers themselves.

6 years ago I was very excited about Webmatrix though. It was available for a wide variety of Windows versions, including all Vista and 7 edtions (I think it was even available for all XP editions, up to Webmatrix v2). 

Webmatrix is a very elegant solution to make non-coders and non-techies familiar with the basics of web-technology (cut-down local web server serving a wide variety of popular extensions). I never used it that way, but in theory it could be used as a standalone local app-server for all sorts of things like CRM, Invoicing systems, document management tools, etc, QuickerSite always ran perfectly well on Webmatrix. It has helped me to locally test-drive and develop things without the need for the heavier IIS Management Console (not available in many Windows versions anyway).

Microsoft has - in the past 15 years - changed strategy a little to often in my opinion. Look at PHP. PHP has not really changed over the past 15 years. There has been a lot of new libraries for PHP, yes, but the core PHP code syntax did not change much. Because of that, PHP gained in popularity year after year. PHP never lost users, only won new ones. 

MS should have done the exact same with classic ASP (their answer to PHP in the mid 90's), rather than develop their ASP.NET 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 monsters. Similar to PHP, ASP could have gradually been upgraded with new functions, like dealing with zip-, pdf- and image-files. 

Just my 2 cents.

Yesterday I released QuickerSite v43. QuickerSite v42 was the longest living version of QuickerSite ever. And actually, QuickerSite v43 is mainly a service release - fixing some small issues (most of them were never reported). There is no reason to upgrade a site to v43.... except...

...if you are into Bootstrap!

QuickerSite v43 ships with a new menu-variable: [QS_BOOTSTRAPMENU_3] This variable flushes out the QuickerSite menu in a Bootstrap 3 compatible syntax. You can see it in action over here: http://pingendo.quickersite.com. I used Pingendo - http://pingendo.com/ for this QuickerSite. Pingendo is an excellent app used for rapid Bootstrap prototyping.

At this very moment however, I am upgrading some websites with the help of Mobirise. Check out some examples:

• www.gmr.be
• www.ortholubbeek.be
• www.gelnagels-ilse.be
• www.helsen.be
• www.villakatz.be

I also put up a video explaining the basics on how to convert a Mobirise website to a QuickerSite template. Check it out! This is not gonna be as easy as uploading an Artisteer template. Despite the fact that Bootstrap templates look like they keep it "small and simple", .... they're not. The possibilities are endless and at this point, I still have to learn a lot before making up my mind how to further automate things in QuickerSite. And also... Bootstrap 4 is around the corner, so there as well I expect some important changes.

That's it for now!