I recently discovered a neat trick in Google Photos. I needed an easy way to isolate and upload 1000's of photos and movies that were stored on old disk drives (they were about to crash). I found out that the easiest way to do that, is to search for *.jpg of *.mp4 files by using Windows search, and next drag and drop these results into the Google Photos webpage (the one with the overview of your photos). Make sure to use Chrome. You can easily upload 10.000 images/movies in one go. It may take a while to upload that many files, but it sure is worthwhile.

Update 1: forget about the "search for" trick I mentioned above. In fact, it's even much easier: just drag 'n drop a complete folder or even a complete disk drive in the Google Photos webpage. This will automatically upload all images and movies (and not the other files). I uploaded over 30.000 images and movies in the past 48 hours this way. Amazing.

Update 2: Apple users would typically use the Pictures app to sync their photos accross various devices and integrate with iCloud. However, they only have 5GB free storage wich is not much when dealing with images and movies. They then need to buy an online storage plan for a monthly fee. Google photos could be a solution for them as well. You need to export pictures from the Pictures app before uploading though. That's a little inconvenient...

Immediately after your upload, Google will automatically sort the uploaded material by day, month and year. The hours and days that follow, you'll get dozens of suggested collages, animations, movies and styled images. Wonderful. Also, Google will automatically remove double uploads. Very useful. And with the built-in face-recognition you can easily see yourself growing older and uglier year after year. That's a minus. There are also very useful search-capabilities. If you're looking for a guitar, just search for "guitar" and all images with a guitar will show up. You can also combine keywords in your searches, as well as people's names. Very powerful. For instance, a search for "Pieter drinking beer" returns these images that I turned into a collage for the occasion:

(actually, on 2 pictures, it's not me drinking beer, it's my brother and sis... )

Another example, this comes up when searching for all firstnames of my family.. Google finds all our family-pictures taken over the years. There were many more, but I made a collage again. All I had to do to get this going, is tag my family members on a handful of photos (few days ago). Google did the rest. I would never have been able to find them myself in my collection of 50.000 photos.

Above all... it's all 100% free. The only "limitation" is that Google reduces photo's to 16MP and movies to 1080p. These are not even limitations... You really don't need a paid solution to store and backup images and movies these days. At least....

How about privacy? What if Google suspends my account? I'm less worried about privacy. I have not one single photo that I need to hide from the outside world (except the ones where I drink beer perhaps). I am more worried about Google suspending my account for some reason. Or what if Google simply disappears at some point? I will then lose all my pictures, movies and memories.

Thinking about this ... maybe it's a good idea to store everything on a local disk somewhere as well... 

I have recently been (re)doing some sites. 

https://www.tisma.be

https://www.schoonheidsinstituutveerle.be/

https://www.petecorman.com/

https://www.vttt.be/

Actually, the first one is a QS on a Mobirise template. The 3 others are pure Mobirise, nothing to do with QS. I recently bought myself a copy of Mobirise. It's an amazing simple little tool that creates great sites... I'm using it for some years already and I must admit it has grown to a very mature state. Especially when you combine it with some custom JS, CSS and/or iFrames, the sky is the limit.

It's a sad day for QS. Today, I have given the installation ZIP files a try. It was a major shock to find out that none of the downloads (the regular QS nor the Mobirise edition) actually worked. They caused an error when installing.

I have meantime fixed the issue. But I have absolutely no idea how many people must have tried to download and install QS, without any luck. It may have been going on for more than a year. And nobody has ever reported any issue.

It somehow makes sadly clear how dead QS is today. I'm not blaming anyone, let me make that clear. It's just sad. That's all there is to say I guess.

"It is important in life not to be strong, but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once. If you want something in life, reach out and grab it."

I'm quoting Christopher McCandless - the man from Into The Wild. For some odd reason, his story only came to my attention today, after yet another adventurer died when searching for the Magic Bus in Alaska.

For most people, measuring yourself, "reaching out and grab it", would typically mean: get a decent job, make a lot of money, raise the kids, freak out on weekends and keep yourself in good shape by working out. And last but not least: live a fake second life on Facebook.

But for me, these couple of words mean something else. I can relate to McCandless's story. I feel like I have not yet measured myself to the bone. I always feel like the best is yet to come. For some years now I have tried to make it as a singer-songwriter and as such I have often tried to reach out and grab something. But I've never known what there really is to grab, other than expressing myself through my songs, my guitar, the lyrics and my voice.

But I'm 47 years old. And I fear that my best years are behind me. It's a sad feeling. And I know that this is the case for most people. But still...

Developing QuickerSite back in 2006-2014 sure also felt like reaching out. But I didn't grab anything with it ;) Story of my life.

I was told years ago to never run real time virus protection software on Windows Servers. They would slow down the whole thing, especially when lots of file I/O is done. Like is the case when using Access databases in classic ASP web applications. But WordPress also seems to generate a lot of disk i/o, more than what I had expected.

I noticed that on my AWS server, by default, real time virus protection (known as Defender by Windows users) is switched on. So I took the challenge and checked out the difference in loading speed of my hosted websites with and without Defender switched on. The difference is ... massive.

With Defender switched off, websites load up to 70% faster. Good to know I think... I bet there are better virus scanners than Defender for Windows... but they all cost a fortune. Not sure they're worth it... I better stick to a good backup plan in case a virus hits.

It's amazing how Mobirise keeps on coming up with things I added to QS years ago. Check out https://mobirise.com/extensions/popup-builder/

Their next big thing would obviously be a way to provide content behind passwords. This can be done with just JavaScript. Mobirise *could* encrypt html that can only be decrypted with a given password. This library seems to do the trick. This solution comes nowhere near the QuickerSite intranet area, but in many cases that is not needed. 

SendGrid turns out to be a working solution for sending out emails in QuickerSite. The settings below (/asp/config/web_config.asp) work fine for me. You have to signup and create an API key. Finally, use the password for that API key. You can send up to 100 messages/day for free. 

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.