The reason why we need this new Framework, is that we have been familiar with Classic ASP coding for more than a decade, and we do not see any reason to migrate to a different web technology for some obvious reasons:

• server hardware/software requirements
• valuable (10+ year old) knowledge about a technology that has passed the test of time
• large libraries of valuable scripts we have successfully used over the years
• and finally, our successful businesses that are built around Classic ASP technology

What is this framework supposed to be like?

A developer framework, a developer API if you like, should facilitate the following common tasks every modern web developer takes care of:

• Easily manage and deploy a wide variety of different types of web pages
• Develop and deploy dynamic web forms
• Write, read, export and import a wide variety of filetypes (html, xls, txt, pdf, zip, jpg, xml,…).
• Send (smpt) and receive (pop3) emails through web pages
• Integration with one or more WYSIWYG editors (CKEditor)
• Integration with one or more JavaScript frameworks (JQuery)
• Integration with important Social Media websites like Youtube, Twitter and Facebook
• Integration with important web standards: RSS, ATOM, JSON and XML webservices.
• Integration with GoogleMaps
• Powerful file-management
• Support for true multilingual applications and websites
• User management: who is supposed to do and see what in our project?
• Extendibility: every developer must be able to make extensions for the framework, without the need to change its core files.

Some technical specifications/requirements:

• Made with VBScript 5.6 and Classic ASP 3.0. Fully compatible with IIS 5, 6, 7 and 8
• The code is 100% object oriented, using the VBScript CLASS statement whenever possible.
• The UTF-8 charset is the default charset
• Connectivity with at least 2 popular database management systems (Access and SQL Server)
• AJAX should be implemented and facilitated where possible
• 3rd party COM components will not be used nor supported. Only built-in VBScripting components can be used for the framework
• The framework should be easily updatable, and free to use

Did I forget something?

I think QuickerSite matches this framework for at least 50%. QuickerSite takes care of a lot, but it's a standalone CMS, and not a real framework. So we need to get to the coding machine.

Who's in?

The book would be about computers, for sure, and music, and love. And raising kids. It would be about QuickerSite, and all people I met over the years and how some of them became friends. Long distance friends that I will never meet in real life, but who mean more to me than the vast majority of people I meet every day. Very strange. It's such a typical and very shocking characteristic of our internet generation.

My book would be about generations, older people, and kids. What's gonna bring the future for our kids? Why did the older - post-war - generation fuck up our environment, our economy, our future? In what a world will our kids grow old?

And how would my life be like in 10 years from now? If it's true that - i'm 39 years old now - i am supposed to have had the most exciting time of my life by now - I'm not sure if I want to grow any older. Maybe better put this all to an end before it gets even worse?

I face some challenges. I need to quit smoking, eat less fat and healtier, do sports and all that. It scares me off. 

I need to get a new life. Microsoft gave me a job (and a life) back in the nineties, and they took it away in the nillies, by totally screwing up with .net, and loosing the war on web development against open source. I failed to see that in time. Google did, and Facebook did. Of course they did.

My new life would need to be MUCH more exciting than the first half has been. And at this point I just cannot believe that will happen.

Writing a book could be a start. Actually, I think I just wrote its first page.

And here is something that is  cheering me up a little. IIS 8 (Windows 8) will support classic asp. Classic ASP is included in the official IIS 8 logo:

Ok, I agree it's living in the shadow of ASP.NET, but that is the case for a decade already. There is no reason to believe that support for classic ASP will EVER disappear in IIS. That is (some) good news.

Check the website http://www.deredactie.be for more news. You can read about it on each and every news site however.

The same bus company is frequently used by the school of my kids. It's terryfying. One of the schools that was hit, is 10 miles away from where I live.

Nearly 20 hours after the crash most parents do not know yet if their child is amongst the victims. I just can't believe that, and no one else can.

These things happen once a lifetime, or once every 20 years. And that day was yesterday. It's gonna take years for the family of the victims to partially recover from this, if ever that is possible. I hope they get all the help they need, not only today and tomorrow, but for the  next 5 years.

Very interesting book. Everyone can learn a lot by reading it. I found it through the Chrome store.

Enjoy!

I found out this very easy trick:

The src-parameter of the image below is:

<img src="http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/streetview?size=592x400&location=lubbeek,veldstraat&sensor=false" />

Check out the location-parameter in this example:

location=lubbeek,veldstraat

It's all I have to tell Google to show an image of the street I live in. Amazing, isn't it?

The size parameter controls the dimension of the image:

size=592x400

I found this info on http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/streetview/

Enjoy my first song in 2012!

Have a look at the attachment:

1. In the menu, you can click "IIS Admin"
2. Search the site you want to modify
3. Modify the bindings (host headers)
4. Check out all relevant info (site directory, QuickerSite codebase, etc).

This is a very exciting module, as it adds some very useful features to the IIS automation QuickerServer already does (create and delete sites).

Why would QuickerSite users upgrade from Artisteer 3.0 to Artisteer 3.1?

Honestly, I don't know... I personally think Artisteer 3.1 is a VERY minimal upgrade coming from 3.0. You might not even notice any difference.

What I do not get, is why Artister adopts 74kB of JQuery, only, yes ONLY to position blocks. And even that is NOT working fine in IE. I mean, check this website. Blocks fly in the main DIV WAY TOO LATE :) It's very cumbersome. Since JQuery is there anyway, why not use it for other things like:

• nice menus
• tabbed pages
• a JS (AJAX) driven product page with signout options (just the JS/HTML of course)
• CSS for forums and shopping carts
• image galleries

They could do so much better...

It's time for Artisteer to come up with something HUGE in the near future if they want their customers to keep on paying upgrade fees.

Same is true for QuickerSite of course :) Even though upgrades are free-for-life here.

You might like my music as well.

Click to play my first eCD:

http://www.reverbnation.com/tunepak/3499100

In WebMatrix, you can "deploy" your website to an external host. In fact, it is basically some kind of ftp client.

You can test-drive QS in WebMatrix, by downloading the latest WebMatrix (http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/) and signup for a free sandbox on  http://labs.discountasp.net/webmatrix2/.

I'm very excited about this, as this WebMatrix "deploy" is very easy to use. Not only you can use WebMatrix to install and prepare your QS, you now also have the option to use it's internal "deploy" button, to upload your site to the host.

Recorded with my new Santa Cruz Arlen Roth. Impressive guitar!

I have added that goodie for QuickerSite 3.1. The logic is as follows:

• In case you have uploaded an Avatar for your QuickerSite, it will show that avatar.
• In case you don't have an Avatar for the QuickerSite, it will search for the Avatar on Gravatar.com. In case no Avatar is returned, the default avatar is displayed.

I ran a little test against the 1750 members in the QuickerSite contact database. I found out that about 2% of them use a Gravatar. Not much, but not bad either.

Uploadify is a popular JQuery plugin that enables multifile uploads and progess bars. We're using Uploadify in QuickerSite for some time.

The footer of my empty - one page - zero posts - Wordpress site tells me:

19 mySQL queries executed in 0.535 seconds

Interesting...

I opened up the full-blown - 40 paged QuickerSite demo site and I monitored database access.

Because I'm too lazy I did not care about calculating the time the SQL queries took, and the time the other elements of the page-load. In total, 38 queries, and the complete compilation of the page in QuickerSites takes 0.281 seconds. Twice as fast. For doing 10 times more. Same laptop. Same time of the day.

Go home Wordpress ....

It's currently test-driving on http://www.sintmartinusschool.be, our kids school (quicker)site.

www.mangermanger.quickersite.com is a work in progress for a restaurant in Tessenderlo

www.reisvrienden.be is for a local travel club

www.ortholubbeek.be is for a new local orthodontic practice

www.openvldlubbeek.be is a waiting page for the site of the liberal party in my hometown

www.plooimeubelen.be is a site, managed by a customer. We did the product browser.

I found out that over 50% of so called "visitors" are actually webbots! The most important bots are GoogleBot, YahooSlurp and Bingbot. There are some more like Yandex and Baiduspaider.

For those amongst us who use shared hosting will not really care about it. They'll love it maybe. But for hosting providers and/or server owners this is becoming a real problem. It means an extremely high overhead for the server. These 1000's of hits and pageloads cause the server to slow down or even (totally) crash.

If this continues, there will no other option but to IP-block some of these webbots. You don't want to block Google, Yahoo or Bing. But who cares about all the others? It could save 20% of traffic and workload for the server.

Just wanted to share this info... Has anyone had similar experience?

The Balcaen fencing site is mainly an Artisteer template with in total 25 picture galleries. I'm very proud of the final result. Hope you like it as well.

Update 09/08: a new beta was released fixing some blocking issues.

dim db
set db=Server.Createobject("ADODB.Connection")
db.open "Provider=Microsoft.SQLSERVER.CE.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=" & server.mappath("/App_Data/classicasp.sdf")

You can download a working sample for WebMatrix. Just unzip the file, right-click, and open it as a website in WebMatrix. Finally, click "Run" to run the sample.

This may not sound very sensational, but in reality, this is a very important piece of code. It's the key to start using WebMatrix in classic ASP. Classic ASP developers often used Microsoft Access databases so far (like we did in QuickerSite for many years - without major or even minor issues btw). Access databases were (and still are) very portable, compared to SQL Server databases. Now this new SQL Server Compact Edition (SQLServer CE) finally gives us another portable option (.sdf files).

That is how Classic ASP Developers can use WebMatrix as a full blown development environment, including database management, for FREE, and everything in 1 place. This is just great. When I developed QuickerSite, I needed at least 3 programs:

• Notepad ++ for the coding
• IIS for the websever
• Ms Access for the database

These 3 are now covered in 1 new tool by Microsoft: WebMatrix. This is amazing. Especially since WebMatrix runs fine on each and every recent Windows PC or Server. And it is now very easy to test-drive web applications. This is going to open a whole new world for those who never managed to run dynamic websites on their localhost.

This is only a beginning. I hope Microsoft will take the time to improve this WebMatrix product, but NOT overload it with features. We'll have to see about that I think :)

Being in this business for quite a few years, I know how much users struggle with permissions and pathing-issues in IIS. In many cases, even the more technical users are not able to setup a website on a localhost. It looks like WebMatrix - finally - offers an elegant solution.

I'm very happy classic ASP developers are - for once - not left alone in the cold rain out there. We can now redistribute our applications in a much easier and userfriendly way, also to non-technical users. Both classic ASP and Global.asa pages are natively supported in WebMatrix!

You can download WebMatrix from its homepage on http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/ .

Another example of this amazing time-saver is www.jeep.autostadleuven.be This local car-dealer site is only one of the dozen of QuickerSites that they manage. They do it all themselves. Barely get them on the phone or get emails. The webmaster is a skilled computer guy, but has no knowledge of HTML and/or CSS. But he likes to learn new things. That's all it takes to get started, and even more!