We're on GitHub
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!
UPDATE 31/03/2023: A bug in Chrome currently breaks the "export as screenshot" feature that I liked a lot. Screenshots now default to 800/600px and do not respect the window-size parameter anymore. This should be fixed in Google 113.
UPDATE: I turned this into a GitHub repository. Make sure to give it a try and report any issue! Thanks!
For a customer, I needed to create pdf files in my classic ASP web app. After looking into both commercial and free PDF creating software, I found out that it can easily be done with Headless Chrome. For free!
You need to have Chrome installed on your computer/server.
Here's the code:
In short, this script launches a command line app, changes the directory to the chrome application, runs Chrome with the parameters needed and finally creates a PDF file from the QuickerSite website. Not only a PDF is generated. I also added a screenshot. "Exit" closes the cmd line app.
Don't get too excited though. This only works if your IUSR has the necessary permissions. This will never work on shared hosting. But if you run your own Windows Server, this might help you out. You also have to create a folder ("D:\Chrome" in this case) where the Chrome user can dump its logs and errors. That's it!
Creating PDF files and images on the fly is something I'm looking for for quite a while in classic ASP. It looks like having this headless Chrome-thing at my fingertips, is going to help a lot! The most exciting thing about this, is that classic ASP developers are - for once - not forced to use outdated or badly supported (or expensive) COM dll's or one or the other open source PHP library to get the job done. This is Chrome people... probably the best software on the planet. Being able to use Chrome features like creating PDF files and generating (complex) images from any HTML/CSS/JavaScript is a big big thing. This opens up a lot of opportunites to classic ASP developers, as long as you run your own Windows server. Have fun!
For me personally 2022 was a good year. I made some new friends. A new band. New great development in Classic ASP. For my employer in Belgium, I built a big application on top of aspLite. aspLite turns out to be the most versatile and powerful AJAX-library I've ever written for Classic ASP. It could even get much better if other Classic ASP developers would join and contribute. Most Classic ASP developers however feel too much shame about being stuck with a dead technology. But they shouldn't. Classic ASP is going nowhere. And that's exactly what makes it a very attractive and solid technology. I hope MicroSoft never touches it again actually... they would mess it up no doubt.
As classic ASP is available for Windows 2022 servers, the end-of-life for classic ASP will never be before Oct 14, 2031. In all honesty, I can't think of a single reason why classic ASP would not ship with any future Windows server edition. That makes it the most reliable web development technology one can use on a Windows server (Windows NT 4.0 (1996!) onwards). Any ASP.NET version or variant has been given up or has been replaced by yet another version over the years. So stay away from ASP.NET... Use classic ASP, or better... go PHP. PHP is even older than classic ASP. The older the better... I'm getting old...
For nearly 10 years now, QuickerSite is in idle mode. And more and more I tend to look at this as an asset, a "selling point". No bugs. No security issues. No critical updates. No urgent hotfixes or patches. QS is fine as it is. And the longer this takes, the better it's looking. I have setup a couple new QuickerSites in 2022. I used QS for a formbuilder (basically only using it for all sorts of forms) and another acts as an online journal, reconverting the QS catalogs to a basic library-manager. Nothing spectacular. But very efficient and nobody cares or even knows it's classic ASP and nothing but QS in the back. Love it.
I do feel like bringing Bootstrap 5 into the QS backsite would be a great idea though. And it would not necessarily be too complex. It would not cause any security or any other blocking issue in any way. But it would drastically improve backsite usability and looks count too. It would also be great to finally get rid of anything that still relies on or refers to Artisteer. Teaming up with Artisteer was the worst decision I ever made in QS. I should rather have chosen Bootstrap back in 2010. Bootstrap could have been a major selling point for QS. Artisteer never was.
Happy 2023 to all of you!
Pieter
- David says: (06/01/2023 02:01:45)And a happy new year from Kiwiland... Well done for all your achievements Pieter, at 70yrs I'm starting to wind down a bit, but still active. Bootstrapping the QS Backsite sounds like a great idea, site editors will love it :-)
- Mik says: (27/05/2023 10:24:15)Delayed Happy New Year to you Pieter from Denmark
. I would like to join David. I really think that upgrading the backsite with Bootstrap is an innovative idea.
I have recently installed QuickerSite on a Windows Server 2022 (hosted on Azure). No problems as such. Still the exact same things to keep in mind:
- Install IIS and ASP using the Server Manager
- Enable 32-bit applications in the IIS application pool
- make sure permissions are set (ie make sure Everyone has full permissions on the fysical directory of your QS)
But I faced another problem. There is a bug in the built-in SMTP server. In short: it does not work. I hope MicroSoft will fix that in the coming months. But I doubt so. The built-in SMTP server dates back from Windows 2003 and still needs IIS6 to configure it. I guess it's time to move away from that SMTP server. I installed a 3rd party SMTP server named MailEnable. I used MailEnable before on a Windows 2008 Server. So far so good.
To summarize: QuickerSite is fully compatible with Windows Server 2022. But you need a 3rd party SMTP server to get the emails working. That's some good news at last.
I feel like ... writing a blog post. It's been ages.
asplLite is doing pretty wel. It's doing great actually. I get very promising feedback from users all over the world on a regular base. asplite is also very well received on Github with nearly 40 stars. Not bad for classic ASP development. I'm currently working on a first huge web application using aspLite and the results are very satisfying. aspLite is reliable, bugfree, fast, lightweight, secure, slick. Especially the ajax formbuilder is a huge step in the right direction when it comes to modern web applications built in classic ASP. And Bootstrap... I love Bootstrap, no doubt one of the most powerful CSS-frameworks around.
Did I mention this before? Classic ASP being left for dead by M$ has caused it to be one of the most stable and secure web development frameworks around. No upgrades, no fixes and no security issues basically means: no surprises and no headaches for our applications. They just keep on running. Always. Go tell WordPress users.
On a sidenote, I won a regional singer-songwriter contest few months ago. As a result, I'm having much fun performing on lots of stages these days. In a few weeks from now, I'll be performing on a TV show with over 1.000.000 viewers. Looking forward to that. There was a time that I was dreaming of being as successful as a singer/songwriter then I was back then as a web developer. Today it's the other way around. It turns out that the grass is always greener on the other side after all :)
Cheers! Pieter
The answer is short: the ADO & ODBC tandem.
ADO is a programming interface to access data in a database. As from IIS 4 (Windows 98, PWS), the ADO programming interface ships with IIS as a built-in interface. ODBC stands for Open Database Connectivity. ODBC is a standard application programming interface (API) for accessing database management systems (DBMS). It's available to any Windows operating system as from Windows 95. (source: Wikipedia)
Long story short: in classic ASP - when using the the IIS-built-in ADObjects - you can connect to any popular DBMS (Access, Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, ...) by simply creating an ODBC connection on your local computer or server.
To use such DSN in your classic ASP application:
dim db : det db = Server.Createobject("ADODB.Connection")
db.Open "DSN=mySQL" (in case you named your ODBC connection "mySQL")
From there on, your can launch any CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) statement against your data. Both MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle and PostgreSQL provide 64bit ODBC drivers. So classic ASP developers benefit from the very latest bug fixes and improvements that come with every new release of any given ODBC driver.
This is amazing. And it somehow ensures that classic ASP is there to stay. Even if it's going nowhere. Perhaps ... because it's going nowhere. I really think so.
Happy coding!
- Sergio says: (04/02/2022 09:53:46)Hi Pieter,
a question since in the post you mention MySQL.
Can QS use a MySQL database? - Pieter says: (04/02/2022 09:58:56)Sergio, yes. It did back in 2008. But at that time, MySQL was not unicode-proof. So I dropped support for MySQL and kept support for SQL Server and Access only. Today I only use Access. And it works fine. Never had any issue with QS on Access ever since I decided to stop using SQL Server somewhere 3 years ago. I now host 300 QuickerSites on Access. No problems at all. This website also uses Access. I have customers with up to 10.000 unique visitors/day, on Access.
Why would you want to use MySQL for QS? - Sergio says: (04/02/2022 10:28:01)It was just a curiosity, and I was wondering why I hadn't given the option to use a MySQL database.
But now in your answer I understand.
I recently discovered this editor: https://code.visualstudio.com/ and with great pleasure it has support for asp classic (with plugins), maybe it can be useful for you. - Pieter says: (04/02/2022 12:14:30)Yes I know that editor. But I prefer Notepad++ for asp coding. For coding in general btw :)
For a customer I need to babysit 6 WordPress websites. Shocking results after 1 full year of babysitting:
- in total, a handful plugins suddenly stopped working (forcing me to disable automatic updates)
- sites went down completely due to badly working plugins
- websites got hacked for unexplicable reasons and needed to revert to backups.
1 year... This is a joke. QuickerSite hasn't been upgraded since 2014. Not a single issue. Guess to which CMS I will migrate these 6 sites....
- Pieter says: (02/02/2022 19:45:13)whooops once again. a WP site, 18 plugins. all up-to-date. 1 plugin causes the complete site to crash.
you have no idea how often i had to update wp_options and set active_plugins to a:0:{} already...
What. A. Mess. - JohnW says: (25/04/2022 16:15:09)Were you running them on IIS? I have to support a couple of Wordpress sites on a Windows server. I find that WP out of the box works like a dream on IIS but there are issues with some of the plugins because the developers have only ever tested the thing in a UNIX environment. With the plugins which were hang when you try to update them I find you can get around it by downloading the zip, opening it and dropping the directory it contains into the appropriate place in File Manager.
There's also a site I run written in classic asp, but that isn't obvious because I use URL rewriting. Every so often I find 404 errors in the server logs which are the result of someone (or something) looking for a non existent WP login page. I'm tempted to add a page which fits the URL and put a rude message on it.
Few weeks ago I received this message. It really meant something to me. So I decided to share, as an alternative Happy new year wish. Happy New Year BTW!
"Pieter, many years ago I came across Quickersite and I payed I think for something (I hope I was a payer and not just a downloader) and I was overwhelmed with how amazing it all was. I thought I'd found the holy grail for me being a provider of web services... but my history has followed a similar trajectory to QS and I'm now wandering the plains with a lot of other buffaloes wondering what to do next. I read your posts occasionally as they are, and for a weird reason - it gives me hope. Hope because what you had going here was SO ON THE MARK. But the world rotated a little in another direction and twitter/FB / Instablah and all the other mindless platforms took the collective consciousness away from individual effort and relevant opinion, such that QS no longer had a home. ... Why? Who knows, the world is just different now and windows of opportunity open and close for the most inexplicable of reasons. This could of course be used as an equal answer to: "Why does humanity exist"? A: "For inexplicable reasons". So; no more Concorde, no more digital watches, no more moon landings and no more QS. It is in good company and I loved it."
Hi fellows of QuickerSite,
It took a while again to come up with a new blog post. It sure seems like I’ve doing basically nothing lately. And even if that’s the case for most of the time, I DID come up with some ideas to break the extreme boredom of my life.
For some reason, in the past week, a single of one my songs got released on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music and Deezer. And it is airplayed on a bunch of local radio stations in both Belgium and The Netherlands. Go figure. And I’m even in it for nothing. I got amazing support from a friend musician, my bass-player actually.
It’s a Dutch song about the huge collection of old, wrong and lost loves of my live. There are a few dozens.
Please be my guest and discover, enjoy and SHARE as much as you can. I love you!
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/petecorman
iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/be/artist/pieter-cooreman/1294423452
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6v3B1qel8jsKLI8cl4ZBY3
Deezer: https://www.deezer.com/en/artist/13348657
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pietercooremanmusic
Website: https://www.pietercooreman.be
Today I built a website for a customer again… finally. The last site I did dates back from a couple of months ago. It really feels like I’m retiring. But I’m not, nowhere near actually.
I did it in Mobirise - the free edition - even though I have a commercial license. That’s because I want my customers to be able to take over the site after I hand it over.
Some say Mobirise is boring. And that’s true. Especially the free edition is… plain stupid & simple. But it works. Customers DO understand how to drag/drop a block, add an image, edit a text, and next click publish. So they’re happy.
I have 2 accounts at Mobirise. One for my commercial license, the other for the free one. All it takes is 2 different email addresses. Not very complicated in the end. But you also need 2 different computers to handle this. And that’s a little annoying.
It sure looks like Wix is everywhere these days. They must have a very appealing reseller/affiliation program. I personally think Wix is extremely expensive compared to self hosted solutions like WP, Mobirise or QuickerSite.
Talking about QS… It still hurts to realize we didn’t make it. Because QS (still) is the most reliable, the fastest, the most versatile CMS I could ever have come up with. The galleries, the formbuilder, the newsletter, the intranet, the forums, the list pages, … these were all very useful features. And they still are. I recently (few weeks ago) uploaded quite a few improvements to the QS GitHub repository. Mainly cosmetical changes, and things related to HTML5 (finally). Small improvements for all sorts of forms and the QS formbuilder.
But those updates do not change the fact that QS is dead. But not yet buried.
My aspLite experiment ended up nowhere too, and no one seems to understand where this could have lead to, or how it could have put classic ASP back on track. But as MS is focusing more on hosted services (Azure, Office 365, Xbox Live, GitHub and more) it’s becoming clear that guys (or small companies) like me have absolutely no impact on the future of their hosting/developing products. We’re on our own. So they are. It’s sad. Open source technology has taken over this past decade.
Take care!
- Bob says: (08/08/2020 11:52:46)By coincidence I edited a QS site today. I got my "activation" email on 26/04/2008. So twelve years later QS is still the best CMS I have found or used (and I think I have used them all)
- David says: (09/08/2020 13:47:21)Me too Bob, I still have a few clients on QS and they never give me any problems. SEO is getting to be an issue on some of the older ones but that's mostly to do with responsiveness and missing SSL
I just updated a test site with the new codebase on GitHub but not seeing any obvious changes, maybe it's mostly to do with the inner workings.
Good to hear from you both, keep safe :-) - Mik says: (15/08/2020 08:06:07)Also me, I still have more customers using QS. I have always believed that QS is the best CMS, which is due to all the points you are making on Pieter. Too bad there is no further development on QS. But it's never too late .... :-).
- Pieter says: (15/08/2020 12:00:29)Thanks guys! Well QS is on GitHub now... Everything has been put in place to save it for the future and keep it alive somehow.
The truth is: in these past 6 months, it has had 0 issues, 0 pull requests, 0 actions, etc... And it barely had visitors and/or downloads.
Lately QS suffered from some issues due to recent Microsoft changes to OLEDB drivers (I assume) causing some features in QS to crash (like creating, copying, deleting sites). I *think* they have been solved by now.
The thing is, as long as QS is my personal playground, nobody will feel comfortable adding things to it... or taking the lead in one way or the other. And the ASP code is sooo complicated (and scrambled) that it's nearly impossible to start making serious changes... That's how I see it at least...
I’m near to complete a first release of aspLite. There is still some documentation to write. And that will no doubt result in a few optimizations and fixes.
What started off as a light-weight ASP/VBScript framework (a bit of an empty box though), turned into a very exciting ASP Ajax formbuilder, facilitating feature-rich SPA’s (Single Page Applications).
The new demo is such an SPA, including 24 different forms. Some are expecting user-input, others are just delivering dynamic content.
These past few days I started to realize that developing such SPA’s is much more complex than building web applications the more “classic” way, with plenty of response-redirects to rebuild tables and parts of the GUI. It’s obviously more complex to build Ajax-driven apps. Hence the need for a framework.
Because things can get complicated very quickly, I made sure to include a "basic" example that most ASP/VBScript will quickly be able to understand (including me).
If you did not have the chance to have a closer look at aspLite, make sure to do so and download the current version from GitHub. Please report any bug or share any feedback! I'd love to work towards a first release in the coming days.
- Pieter says: (15/05/2020 19:19:58)It's a WRAP! Today I have released aspLite v0.1.0 - https://github.com/aspLite/aspLite. These past 7 weeks were amazing. I have learned quite a bit about JavaScript frameworks, their potential, but also their limitations. One thing has become very clear to me: there will always be some browser-compatibility issues when using any JavaScript library. A bit of a browserwar cannot be avoided as it seems. That said though, JavaScript frameworks and libraries are there to stay. The rise of JavaScript development frameworks (driven by Google, Twitter and Facebook) this past decade has made that very clear.
Being able to combine them with a solid server-side technology like ASP, puts a web developer in an even stronger position. When it comes to database-integrations or file-sharing, solid server-side security is indispensable. With aspLite I have found a way to position myself between the popular JavaScript frameworks on the one hand, and a solid server side framework delivering secure applications on the other.
Because make no mistake: JavaScript frameworks are extremely prone to security breaches of all sorts. It's not because ajax calls do not expose parameters in the address bar of a browser, that they are secure. They never are actually. JavaScript frameworks always need to be implemented with care, and with serverside security in mind. And that's not always obvious, to say the least.
Anyway, enjoy aspLite!
It’s not even a month ago that I baptized my early Covid19 ASP-experiments aspLite…. This past month has been amazing. Just to name a few things:
- GitHub gave me back my developer-vibes
- I learned how to use GitHub as a free hosting company (including free SSL) for HTML websites (only)
- I struggled my way through VBScript’s rather limited (but useful) capabilities to work with binary files – but I managed, and how…
- I developed a brand new jQuery multifile uploader with client-sided image-resizing capabilities (never been done before in ASP)
- I discovered DataTables (thanks again Sergio Conselvan) and wrote a rocking fast classic ASP integration for it (never been done before in ASP)
- I learned a bunch about jQuery’s Ajax integration and why it’s still the best JavaScript toolset out there
- Learned how to use CKEditor 4 & 5 with classic ASP
- Finally understood the buzz about JSON and why it has drastically changed the web development business in the past 15 years (and why JavaScript is so popular today)
- Dived into Bootstrap (again) and I’m convinced it’s still the way to go for new web applications, even after 10 years.
- I fully understand that QS has an outdated GUI, but it’s still the best web application I ever developed, and it always will be.
- Classic ASP is dead. But that has its advantages too. No worries about compatibility-issues. ASP 3.0 has not been updated ever since 2000.
- aspLite collected 11 stars on GitHub. And I’m VERY happy with that.
- finally, I have been reading CNN’s news feed (just for developing purposes) a lot, and I now know they’re not really keen on Donald Trump. Quite on the contrary.
Not bad for just 1 month...
