Pieter's Blog
Last year he was not heavy enough to keep the knives going. Now he is :)
- nick6352683@yahoo.com says: (22/05/2013 17:05:54)Good, now that he is heavy enough, you don't have to feed him that often. 3 meals a week should do it !!!
P.S. My inbox now awaits tons of hate mail and death threats!!!
- Bob says: (22/05/2013 17:32:07)Hate mail? You're too liberal Nick. You'll be voting for Obama next!
Children should be treated like dogs. Wait... hear me out.
Dogs need exercise, discipline and affection. They need to understand who is in charge and where their place in the pack is (at the bottom)
If you leave a power-vacuum any dog will try to become pack leader - just like children. How many times have you been in the supermarket and seen kids who were clearly in charge with parents who gave in to them all the time.
Kids and dogs need to understand that there are rules, there are sanctions for rule breaking and they have responsibilities to the pack before they get any "rights" (human or otherwise.
I may not know much about children but it all seems straightforward to me. - Pieter says: (22/05/2013 17:41:08)I do know something about raising kids. And I totally agree with Bob. Except, my kids usually do not
- Bob says: (22/05/2013 17:49:21)Then they obviously understand who is in charge
- nick6352683@yahoo.com says: (22/05/2013 17:57:27)WOW !!! I was going for the worst person in America, and you managed to to win the worst person on the planet award - I'm jealous !!! And in an extremely funny way. Unfortunately we both can never go to prison, because if we do and these emails come to light, we probably will end being the boyfriends of some nasty, ugly, and fat disgusting people! So be good...
I'm going to avoid the Osama comment you made, because if I get into politics, ethics, decency, honesty, and such, I will lose many good friends. He has a special place in my heart, right next to Stalin, Hitler, Saddam, Bin Laden, Al Capone, the U.N., and WAYNE (fu**ing traitor) ROONEY !!!
I think I just passed you in the "worst person on earth" award - yeah baby! - David says: (22/05/2013 18:16:48)Eeeek, careful Nick the IRS might get you!
- nick6352683@yahoo.com says: (22/05/2013 18:46:56)They are already monitoring all my emails, phones, and I think I just saw a drone flying above me! Richard Nixon must be so proud now.
See Bob what you started? I've got IRS issues now!
Today I installed the free Webmatrix 3 preview. Webmatrix 2 stopped working on my PC a while ago, but after I uninstalled all its components, Webmatrix 3 now works fine.
The interface is getting better! And you can install nice extensions. I installed the iPad and iPhone simulator (yes, Webmatrix is a MS product!). No sign of a Surface simulator :)
This is pretty good, as you can now preview applications on iPads and iPhones. It saves a lot of time and money. The simulator simulates viewports. As far as I can judge, they are very accurate! Check out the video, where I demo a sample of JSTemplates.com on the pre-release of QuickerSite 4.
- nick6352683@yahoo.com says: (16/04/2013 01:57:40)Mine stopped twice. I did everything to get it going. Spent days on Google trying to get answers. Installed and uninstalled it dozens of times. Then I accidentally discovered the solution. BTW, the iis express was not getting started, and kept giving me the "waiting for localhost" crap until it timed out. That forced me to play and learn more about WordPress btw..., since I hate working live on the internet, and I am too lazy to fire up my old laptop (too slow compared to my I7).
My solution was to empty the browsers cache, I know, it's stupid, it does not make sense, so until today, Webmatrix works with IE and Firefox, because I deleted their caches, but cannot get Chrome to start it, since I did not empty its' cache.
The problem that I'm having today is to upload templates in a QS 4.0 beta site (Artisteer or JStemplates) running in Webmatrix. I have the zip component installed (I'm stupid - but not that stupid), and even small sized templates cannot be uploaded either.
One issue that needs to be solved first is to change the upload file size limitation from 200kb, which is the IIS express's default value. I can't get the correct answer to do that yet. Anyone who knows how to increase that value will be much appreciated.
I need to conduct more tests to say with certainly who is at fault.So tonight I will:
- Try uploading Artisteer templates in a QS 33 web site, in webmatrix (JStemplates will not work with QS 33).
- I will try QS 4 beta on my second laptop, which has IIS7 installed and not web matrix, to see if that works.
- Try QS 4 on the web.
I used to be a huge Microsoft fan, but they managed to screw almost everything up. That's what monopolies do.
They managed to screw Windows, right after they managed to deliver a near perfect product with Windows 7, they screwed up the Office, mainly with their stupid pricing and with it forcing us to buy yearly subscriptions. They made IIS almost impossible to install and configure properly without becoming a network specialist, Webmatrix works as it pleases, and I can go on and on. - nick6352683@yahoo.com says: (16/04/2013 02:05:52)They stopped developing ASP Classic more than a decade ago, and tried to kill it entirely, but thanks to backlash from developers, it's still alive, barely! Now they are trying to kill ASP.net, to promote their stupid metro apps. People spent years and spent thousands of dollars in training and tools for those technologies, and every 4-5 years they shelve them, and force people to spent even more. Now the rumors are that they are trying to kill the desktop and have metro as the only interface, to promote their stupid marketplace, like Apple, Google, and Amazon with their stupid ecosystems. Don't get me started with cloud computing - it's one thing to wanting of using the cloud, and handing over my data to them (specially my sensitive data), but it's another thing to be forced in using it.
The only thing that rocked since the late 80's until today is their Flight Simulator. Flight Simulator X by Microsoft is simply amazing! That's what they have to show for after 40+ years of dominance - idiots!
One of these days, I will tell you exactly what I think about Microsoft! Apple is even worse btw, and my anger towards Artisteer is off the charts!!! Whew... I feel much better now!
- Pieter says: (16/04/2013 08:53:17)Nick, you can also just use IIS and open the site under http://localhost/. You can change the aspmaxrequestentityallowed parameter under the ASP tab (limits). That is what I when I need to seriously test things. But I prefer Webmatrix for quick and dirty testing, as all it takes is to rightclick a folder and open it as a website in webmatrix. Not only I test QS with Webmatrix, I also use it to test drive JQuery plugins.
Give Webmatrix 3 a go. It looks like they have sorted out some issues, and they have added some features that were requested long time ago (search in all files, just to name one).
Remember the days we used tables for designing websites? Those were the days.... I used tables for basically all websites and applications I did until let's say 5 years ago.
Check out this table-driven layout. It 100% validates as HTML 4.01 Transitional. What is more important though: it's only 2KB! No scripting, no heavy CSS. 2KB. And 100% compatible with ALL browsers, from IE4 to IE10, and all browsers we saw coming and going in between. Nobody can do this with divs, except with MAJOR scripting and heavy CSS, if at all it is possible. Especially stretching the divs to the bottom of the page is impossible without major CSS hacking. And it would fail on older browsers, like IE6. Check it out on http://netrenderer.com! My table driven layout renders 100% pixel perfect on all IE versions. Try that with a div-based layout.
In order to duplicate this table-driven example with divs, you have to search for the Holy Grail. Don't laugh. Because that's what designers call it. The Holy Grail! Are you kidding me? It took me 5 minutes to setup my own Holy Grail. Holy Grail my a...
I'm getting old. But why do some people want to reinvent the wheel year after year?
Classic ASP applications, with pure table driven layouts. THOSE are my Holy Grail :)
Before you die from laughing, have a look at this QuickerSite. I used my table design for this site. Apart from the fact it's ugly and incomplete, it DOES work. And it will always do, no matter which browser you use. Check out the QS template here.
Sometimes I miss those days. Things were easy and simple back then... Ooooh yeah, I'm really getting old!
- David says: (10/04/2013 18:01:24)I still have two sites that never upgraded and still use table design: http://globaltribe.co.nz/ and http://www.cafe93.co.nz/. Both are seven years old, use V1.78 and still doing the job. No maintenance and all the customer needs plus great SEO
- Pieter says: (10/04/2013 18:09:47)Pretty good sites. I know what you mean about SEO. Our QS table driven design had some magic SEO built-in. I never found out why that was the case...
Me too I still host at least 100 of those table driven sites. That includes one of mine actually: http://degitaar.iseral.be/. Haven't touched that site in years... Or one of my favorites: http://www.wimtuerlinckx.be/
Any more table driven QuickerSites out there? - Bob says: (17/04/2013 21:35:54)http://jalon-valley-villas.com/
Not only tabled but, in a very competitive SEO area it manages to do really well. A search for villas in the specific area (Jalon Valley) turns it up above two or three really big companies who spend a fortune on SEO and advertising.
- nick6352683@yahoo.com says: (17/04/2013 22:32:51)And that's the difference between Quickersite and WordPress. With QS, you build a site, and forget about years, and years later it's still standing still. By this time, it looks archaic, outdated, but at least it is still there.
With WordPress, you have about 3 months. Even 3 months is too much. Not only initially you have to setup the site securely (correct folder permissions, locking up the configuration files, changing the default table prefixes from wp_ to something else, stop WP from transmitting what version it is, installing a captcha, limiting the logging tries, hiding the login url, and other security steps), but you have to make timely updates to it. It could be a good thing for web designers though, as they can sell maintenance services as well.
BTW, there is a very aggressive webbot campaign in hacking WordPress installations the last week or so, so QS looks even better now.
http://wpmu.org/security-alert-for-wordpress-users/
http://ithemes.com/2013/04/15/ongoing-wordpress-attacks-details-and-solutions/
Also, in QS having html+CSS templates as oppose to php, and not having a marketplace for third party plugins, works to our advantage when it comes to security. What we lose however, is functionality and more features. We truly are dependent on the QS codebase to deliver everything. Nothing is perfect here, it's about making certain choices, which all them have pros and cons, and chasing to find the ultimate perfect cms is impossible.
You might as well build a craft that can go at the speed of light. It simply can't happen, since as you get close to that speed, the time will slow down, thus preventing you to ever reaching the speed of light - ever! (This theory was proven with the atomic particle accelerator).
- Pieter says: (17/04/2013 22:46:33)QuickerSite IS lightning fast when hosted in good conditions.
And QuickerSite DOES fully support custom module development. But nobody develops modules for QuickerSite. There are no ASP developers out there who are willing to contribute. But I'm not complaining. I'm one of the last (but best) classic ASP developers anyway
.
One of the reasons why a QuickerSite can be left alone for years, is because there are no 3rd party modules.
And now the Anonymous people will point their guns on my server and crash it
- Bob says: (18/04/2013 09:09:41)I thought Anonymous only attacked the bad guys.
- Pieter says: (18/04/2013 09:14:55)aaaaarggghhhh you just scared the sh*t out of me Bob! get rid of that avatar
- Bob says: (18/04/2013 09:24:51)I don't know what you mean
I'm proud to release my new baby today: http://jstemplates.com. I hope this thing can grow up to something very exciting in the next few months. Have fun with it!
- Bob says: (12/03/2013 22:14:37)Congratulations - it's a really impressive idea, and well executed too.
- clive says: (15/03/2013 14:02:42)For me it made more sense in 5 mins than several hours on Artisteer ever did! Really great Pieter!
- anneke says: (22/03/2013 15:43:07)Congratulations Pieter. Very nice job and so easy to use. I understood everything the first time and that's a performance (your's).
- info2fontales says: (23/03/2013 12:08:22)Hi Pieter,
I really like this!
It makes life so much easier and the creation of templates that much quicker - well done. I'll keep an eye on this to see how it develops.
Good Job!! - Pieter says: (25/03/2013 10:27:35)thank you all!
i have upgraded the project. check it out: http://jstemplates.com/
You can now load a sample to get started ! - Karl says: (21/05/2013 17:28:03)Just updated my own site to 4.0b AND added a jstemplates.com as the default template. www.netsolutionsmd.com.
Some jstemplates thoughts.
* It would be nice to be able to specifiy the position of standard blocks.
* Are you going to create a source file that can later be modified? Think .artx files.
* How can the footnote text/link be modified?
Had some other thoughts, but I'm old and forgot them.
Karl - nick6352683@yahoo.com says: (21/05/2013 18:11:30)Looks good Karl. I am going to suggest quick things ONLY as a constructive critique and nothing more. We are friends for some years now, so you know that's all it is:
1. Change the bottom corners of the menu radius to 0.
2. At the same time also flatten the top of your header - so change the radius of the top corners of the header to also 0.
3. When re sizing the screen the logo becomes "fuzzy". Use a high resolution image.
4. You need to increase the width of the sidebar, so the sidebar item "Manta" can fit within the page.
5. If you increase the size of the sidebar, your content area will decrease. You can do 2 things to compensate for that.
- Decrease the left padding, by increasing the size of the content.
- Increase the sites overall width. It looks like it is around 920px now, make it 960px, or even 1000px, but do not go over 1000px.
Regarding your comments:
- Insert [QSSITEFOOTER] in the appropriate place to have a customized footer content the usual way. You can opt. in using one of the custom blocks as well for more dynamic footers.
- Regarding saving the source files. My understanding is that the template generator will be part of QS, and editing templates should be included when that happens. The "Load" functionality is disabled now, to preserve server space - just speculating now.
Hopefully very soon, QS will be the only cms that I know of that can produce it's own high quality responsive templates. You can compare this to the WP frameworks in a way, but you get better and faster results with this. The learning curve is not as steep either. So this will be a huge advantage for QS. - Karl says: (22/05/2013 01:36:40)Thanks for the input Nick.
* Re: menu & header radius. I actually had it the way you suggested, but just wanted to do something different.
* Don't have a high resolution logo. Had to pull this from my 2002 website.
* Took me a while to see where the column sizes change.
* Guess we have to physically edit the uploaded template to move Contact just below search.
* I've never really understood how the custom blocks worked. Even did your video. - Pieter says: (22/05/2013 07:55:52)Thanks Karl. I like it! I assume you started from one of the samples.
You need to modify the template (can be done in QS) if you want to change block positions.
On thing perhaps: your left (main) column has some (40px?) extra spacing. I don't know where it's coming from, but I assume you choose to hide the first column, but still gave it 40px width. Not sure though.
Me too I have uploaded a new jstemplate for http://music.pietercooreman.be. Even though http://jstemplates.com is much more limited compared to Artisteer, it does what it has to do.
What I plan to do is offer the source code of jstemplates.com to QuickerSite customers, so they can setup their own branded template builder. That will make it easier to upgrade in the future. - Karl says: (22/05/2013 14:52:38)Yes Pieter I started from a sample. Grabbed some backgrounds from Morguefile and some old images I had. Wanted to do something different, that's why menu is detached and extra space is in body. Sure would be nice to be able to move position of blocks. (hint, hint)
For those of us that have our own servers or virtual servers, loading jstemplates should be fine. However, what about people using shared hosting?
Would we be able to create a template, then at a later date, load that template source and make some minor changes without going to the template in QS? - Karl says: (22/05/2013 15:04:00)RE: Moving boxes. I have to say that because the code is well documented and pretty simple, it took me less than 2 minutes to move the contact box.
I launched a new mini-site today. Check it out below! It was pretty fun to do actually! I will have to find better algorithms (or learn to use them). But for now, this works!
I woke up this morning and took some pictures. I love this weather, so does my son. We spent an hour this morning cleaning the drive. Fantastic!
- Bob says: (16/01/2013 10:05:06)It's very mild normally where I live, so we've got a deep frost but no snow. It's very cold though but that's because today is the day the builder decided to replace the front door!!
- Pieter says: (16/01/2013 10:05:18)LOL
- Thunderhawk says: (31/01/2013 18:17:17)I would like to see this much snow in Norway! :D
This much can fall in an hour or so
Never mind, it is always fun with the snow!!!
For more than 7 years, this Dell Poweredge SC1425 rackserver has been hosting 100's of QuickerSites. In the glory days, it hosted 1200+ QuickerSites. I also developed QuickerSite on it. It did a very good job. Now it's retiring. I moved all sites to a cloud hosting last month.
Some specs of the server:
- 120 GB SATA 7200 RPM
- 3 GB RAM
- Single processor Pentium 4
It costed me € 930 back in 2005 and all these years it was located in a datacenter of Combell, Belgium's biggest hosting company.
I don't know what to do with it, other than dump it. Now that I'm thinking of it: my son can use it when he is building his mountain bike trails in our garden. He can do nice jumps with it I think.
Or maybe I better keep it so it can go to the QuickerSite Museum sooner or later!
This is a picture of Leuven on a cloudy Saturday. This is the city I lived in for about 25 years, and I still go to every time my wife is in a shopping mood. I like this place. If you ever plan a trip to Belgium, make sure to visit Leuven.
- Bob says: (07/10/2012 21:20:03)
- doc says: (09/10/2012 22:17:59)
- doc says: (09/10/2012 22:22:28)
- doc says: (09/10/2012 22:23:09)
- doc says: (09/10/2012 22:24:15)...always ends with something special: Croque Monsieur with Mushroom...and a great Stella Artois!
- nick6352683@yahoo.com says: (09/10/2012 23:25:32)Is that beer? Hurry, hide it, Karl is about to drink it !
I read about it on the IIS-forums, but it’s official now: classic ASP is fully supported on Windows 2012 Servers (IIS8). That includes the use of Access/SQL Server databases and all the built-in components I - as a classic ASP developer - have been using for years (CDOSYS, HTTPRequests, Filesystemobject, etc)
I have setup QuickerSite on 2 beta Windows 2012 shared hosting accounts. All I have with them is an FTP account. I have no direct access to IIS8, but I didn’t have to:
I think this is very good news. This means that we now can develop ASP applications on:
- All Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7 editions (using Webmatrix or Visual Web Developer)
- All Windows Servers from Windows 2000 Server to Windows 2012 Server (IIS5-IIS8)
It looks like Microsoft is silently extending the lifetime of classic ASP with at least 5-6 years, without explicitly mentioning it though. Everything in IIS7 and IIS8 is about ASP.NET. But we -classic ASP developers - are not thrown out like garbage. I think I would like to thank MS for that. Not sure though. MS should never have abandoned the development of classic ASP/VBScript, as it was a very nice toolbox for small-to-medium websites and projects.
My 13y old nephew just sent me a new logo for QuickerSite. I like it a lot. So I'm gonna use it. Thanks a lot Siebe!
Google will not be amused. And they will probably respond with another video :)
- Bob says: (20/06/2012 16:16:26)I'm confused... does that mean Microsoft ARE on our side?
- nick6352683@yahoo.com says: (20/06/2012 19:33:55)At least Google is free, although I see Microsoft's point too. I use them both, MS Office for more serious work, Google Docs, only if I want to be displayed on a web site. I would never create a real financial spreadsheet and place it in somebody else's server - that's plain stupid.
- Pieter says: (20/06/2012 22:58:22)Google pushes mobile and online apps very hard. I'm always amazed when I browse the most popular apps on the Google Web Store - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/home . There are web apps in every domain you can think of or even dream about.
But Google apps are not easily gonna replace dedicated office applications. At least not for bigger companies.
For small companies and one man bands like me, the Google apps are a blessing. I cannot live without GMail, Google Search, Google Maps, Google Analytics, Google Calender, etc. Microsoft can laugh Google in the face, but they should know better. They missed the boat and focussed too long on their .NET crap. Meantime, both Apple and Google took over the lead. Android is the market leader for mobile phones and other mobile devices today. That means a lot... Microsoft is years behind. Only yesterday, they showed their alternative to iPad. As if anyone was waiting for that... 5 years too late :) - nick6352683@yahoo.com says: (20/06/2012 23:43:48)True, but according to the articles that I am reading since Monday when the MS was introduced, hm-hmm, here in Los Angeles, both the MS tablet and the MS phone would interact with pcs better than anything else out there. Also, the MS tablet is more geared towards replacing laptops. that means, it is not just a weak computer, like the ipads and the others. This will make you actually forget about your laptop!!! No pricing yet, but I expect it to be around $1,000, but with the new ipad starting at $500 (I think), it is going to be interesting.
About web apps. No serious company, or individual will want to use software that the data is not stored on their own computers - period. It is a safety issue. And now that Google is co-operating with the US gov., can you imagine keeping your business records on their servers? They won't have to audit you anymore... - Pieter says: (21/06/2012 13:51:58)ouch....
http://youtu.be/J-wjmFQczuM
as I said: MS focusses on technical details, and even forget to TEST their stuff before showing it to the world
- nick6352683@yahoo.com says: (21/06/2012 18:56:11)I remember Windows crashing on Bill Gates while presenting many years ago. I think it was during the introduction of Windows 98 on live tv (CNN), - pretty funny! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZtT0N6r_C0
- Pieter says: (21/06/2012 20:21:55)Me too I remember that. But that was different. Those were the glory days of Microsoft. Everybody was laughing with it. It - nearly - was a promotion stunt.
The crash with Surface earlier this week is rather painful. The presenter tried to hide the fact that it crashed. Until he could not hide any longer. Very painful actually....