I haven't released a new QS version in a while, but that's about to change soon. My recent work with WordPress, experimenting with Bootstrap for other projects, and exploring the Google Search Console have all inspired me to refine some existing QS features and even create an entirely new plugin.
After having played with WordPress for several months now, it's about time to compare it to QuickerSite. Or better, ask myself the question: when to use WordPress and when to stick with QuickerSite?
When stick with QS?
When use WP?
In all honesty, I prefer to keep on using QS for most sites I ever built and ever will build or need. Except in case I'd need e-commerce. I really fell in love with Woocommerce, even though it messes up the performance of your complete site. Even then... love it. But not enough to use WP for any type of site. WP is simply too bloated.
I wouldn't have been me if I'd not look into ways to link developer frameworks to WordPress. So I did: https://playground.iseral.be/
I can now use WP as a container app for custom Classic ASP development using aspLite and Bootstrap, something I've been doing very successfully over the last years.
Are there other JS/CSS frameworks you can think of?
I have never been a big fan of WordPress. But I was wrong all the time. WordPress is in a transition however. It's slowly going away from blog engine to a visual website design tool. Slowly. I share the things I learned these past few weeks. Enjoy!
I have been playing (a lot) with WordPress on IIS (Windows Server 2019) lately. Nick has been very helpful by guiding me around. WordPress is some kind of an application in the end as long as you stay away from performance-killing plugins.
Even though IIS is not the recommended host for WordPress, it does the job. And the stronger your specs, the better. I get very good results on a very basic AWS Cloud Server with 8GB of RAM on 2 CPU's.
The web.config below is all you need to:
Here it is:
I am offered a job as a teacher in Webdesign. So I have a question for you guys. What would you consider modern webdesign tools, trends, do's and dont's? Thanks!
Support for Classic ASP/VBScript is scheduled to be removed on future Windows releases.
This makes no sense at all. Therefore, please sign the petition to stop this madness!
My ebook about aspLite has been read over 1000 times meantime. Happy to share some of the comments so far:
Ilkertr:
I remembered my old Classic ASP programming days. I couldn't learn new asp.net. When I saw your page, I found the excitement of developing something with Classic ASP again. Thank you.
David:
A good read Pieter. Really enjoyed reading about the history of classic ASP and particularly your work in the early years.
Brian:
It's a great read and good that there is still support for this underrated programming language.
Ömer:
I read your ebook until 4:00 AM last night without skipping a line, and I was very impressed. Each sentence made me feel as though I had discovered a long-lost companion with whom I had been wandering the same forest for almost 30 years, yet never knew existed.
Tony:
It made interesting reading especially as, like you, I was left out in the dry as a Classic ASP developer and what made it worse for me was that I had worked for Microsoft for 6 years prior to 1999! Talk about slap in the face, I couldn’t believe it at the time and felt very annoyed that I had dedicated so much time and effort to learn a development language that I had thought would keep me going for years to come!
This is what I'm doing it all for. I just hope this ebook somehow helps people to get on the road again with their Classic ASP skills.
I've been quite busy these last few weeks. After the release of Setlistplanner.com, I developed some apps for my wife's dental practice. I made her a waiting list app and an app to manage her stock. I reused the application template I also developed Setlistplanner on. It's a very promising template, making use of aspLite.
Right after, I was so excited that I decided to write a book about how I used aspLite in Setlistplanner.com and how aspLite led to asplForms, an AJAX-first developer framework for Classic ASP developers. It's a wrap, my ebook is done. It ended up as a highly opinionated MicroSoft bash on its 6 first pages. The rest should be OK.
Lately I have also become a big fan of Google Search Console. It appears that both url-redirection and missing canonical urls are two of the most common issues reported for QuickerSites and my hosted websites in general. My one-codebase solution for all my hosted QuickerSites is under pressure. I once made sure that https://quickersite.com/downloadsection and https://quickersite.com/r/downloadsection are both serving the same page. The "/r" is the name of the virtual directory in IIS. But that is a problem for Google Search. It's marked as duplicate content. I need to look into that someday soon.
I also looked into a new robots.txt file for all my hosted sites. So far, I'm using one of the available suggestions I found on GitHub. It should block many unwanted bots, for what it's worth. Bad bots do not respect robots.txt files anyway.
But what ate most of my energy these past few days, was MicroSoft's recent announcement to retire (and eventually remove) VBScript in future Windows versions. I kind of take it that Classic ASP is in palliative care. Clock is ticking. This announcement is very bad news for us, isn't it? After VBScript gets removed from Windows, it's totally gone. It's no longer available in IIS either. Even though it's not going to be for tomorrow, MicroSoft is clearly up to completely removing Classic ASP-support. I can only advise NOT to use Classic ASP anymore. This day was coming for a while now. But still it's very bad and sad news.
Nick and I, we finally started developing our so called Setlist Planner. As a performing artist I have all kinds of playlists, for all kinds of situations and occasions. It started to drive me crazy. So I decided to come up with a little tool. It may help others.
I uploaded Setlist Planner to Github. Check it out!
In short:
-create an unlimited number of songs and playlists
-sort songs in the playlist manager (drag and drop)
-open the lyrics for a song directly from the playlist manager
-easily copy playlists
-export the playlist to csx, xlsx, pdf or print
Developing this was fun but very hard, as the way this template works, it requires a very good knowledge of JavaScript, jQuery and AJAX. It took me 2 days to finalize. Probably one more day to tweak and complete. Without a very good manual, this new template (and the new ASP/VBScript approach) will never make a chance. There are also some major challenges when it comes to error-catching. But I keep on trying to make this work, that's for sure.
Happy ASP/VBScript coding!
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