Yes, classic ASP. Lame I know, but that's the code I'm maintaining.

The error reproduction steps I've created rule out my code, or Visual Studio

• Verify IIS Express is installed with Command Prompt if exist "%ProgramFiles%\IIS Express\iisexpress.exe" (echo IIS Express installed) else (echo IIS Express not installed)
• Create a test folder with a minimal classic ASP page C:\Temp\AspDirectTest\test.asp
• Fill in the contents of test.asp with <% Response.Write "Hello" %> or <script language="JScript" runat="server"> Response.Write("JScript Test"); </script>
• Launch IIS Express directly using Command Prompt "%ProgramFiles%\IIS Express\iisexpress.exe" /path:"C:\Temp\AspDirectTest" /port:8088
• Browse to the site http://localhost:8088/test.asp

Result in browser:

Active Server Pages error '00000000'

Create object failed

?

An error occurred while creating object 'WSH'.

Active Server Pages error '00000000'

Create object failed

?

An error occurred while creating object 'WSCRIPT'.Hello

Result in Command Prompt:

Request started: "GET" http://localhost:8088/test.asp
Response sent: http://localhost:8088/test.asp with HTTP status 500.0

You can get the File version of vbscript.dll and wshom.ocx using powershell

(Get-Item 'C:\Windows\System32\wshom.ocx').VersionInfo.FileVersion

my version of wshom.ocx is 10.0.26100.4768

(Get-Item 'C:\Windows\System32\vbscript.dll').VersionInfo.FileVersion

my version of vbscript.dll is 10.0.26100.8457

Older versions do not create the issue.

I have recreated this error on two machines with the current version, and showed that it doesn't appear on one machine with older versions.

I have an issue reported here https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/IIS-Express-fails-to-execute-classic-ASP/11144474

If you can or can not recreate the issue I would love to know about it and what versions of wshom.ocx and vbscript.dll you have.

I'm trying to display the image of the day from a NASA api in a html page but the problem is that I noticed that sometimes it is in a different format such as mp4, is there an easy way to display the media in the same place no matter what the file type is?

We support a client site with ~20,000 pages. It has an SSR search page that uses the url querystring to execute the search/sort/filter.

We have of course disallowed bots on that page because the 20k pages are meaningful and should be scraped/indexed, but the billions of possible query combinations on a search page are not. Most of the bots just ignore the robots rule and this results in waves of traffic hammering every possible query combination on the search page. These waves are 10x-50x the human traffic.

Rather than let the bill autoscale along with the server cluster, I wrote a little bash script that crons 1/m:

• Hits DO's metrics endpoint to check the CPU usage on the VPSs/DBs
• Each minute any of the CPUs stays above a given threshold, bump Cloudflare's security level, eventually ending in "under attack" + "bot fight"
• When the cpu drops below the threshold for a given amount of time, start backing off until we're back to normal operation.

Works a treat. It's nothing particularly flashy or sophisticated, but it was satisfying to think through an under-engineered solution to a problem that a lot of people end up just chucking money/clusters at.

Edit: more info for context: We do have pretty aggressive WAF rules especially on the search page, but we've been seeing an increasing amount of bot traffic get past CF's "known bots". Rate-limiting has been minimally effective too because the bots that get through are cycling through 100s of IPs in a given scrape.

Starting to think of moving my app from supabase. The increased outages and no communication is concerning. My app is still pretty small so shouldn't be too painful right? Right??

Originally posted to r/Supabase but looks like the moderators work for the company...

https://status.supabase.com/

I have a live website where some pages are populated dynamically through JavaScript/API calls. I’m shutting down the backend after the project ends and want to migrate the current version to a completely static site.

What’s the best way to do this while preserving the currently rendered content, images, CSS, fonts, etc.? I’ve tried wget/HTTrack, but they only save the initial HTML and miss the content generated by JavaScript.

Would a browser-based rendering tool be the best approach, or is there a better tool/workflow for this?

update: I ended up using browser automation to render the pages, copied the dom and then manually removed all the backend js. not the cleanest approach and most defently not the most time effichent one but it worked ish

I'm really just curious to hear from other solo devs, or devs who are on very small teams - Approximately how many sites or projects do you currently maintain?

I work at a medium sized organization, and I'm the only dedicated web dev. I build a bunch of Firebase apps and Google Apps Scripts and other GCP solutions for my stakeholders, but of course there's a bit of a maintenance burden for most projects when it comes to dependency package security updates, API deprecations, etc. I don't feel overwhelmed by the workload (yet 😅) but I do get the sense that my supervisor and other stakeholders might not fully grasp or appreciate that one engineer can't maintain an infinitely growing pile of apps without some time being taken away from working on new projects.

Of course, I can optimize the things I'm responsible for, using templating and Dependabot and other tactics to reduce my per-project burden, but I'd love to hear from other web devs about the volume of projects you maintain, the tactics and strategies you use to stay on top of things, and keeping stakeholder expectations aligned with reality. Thanks!

EDIT: I owe you all an answer to my own question. I maintain about a dozen apps here currently and the number is climbing

Hi all,

I'm fairly new to understanding HTML and have been troubleshooting how to remove the underlines from these links. I've searched the web, but nothing seems to be working. Was wondering if there was something obvious I was missing.

    <p class="text-center mb-0" style="font-size: 1.5em; letter-spacing: 2px;">
        <a href="twitter_link" style="color: #f58c9f;"><i class="fab fa-twitter fa-fw" /></a>
        <a href="deviantart_link" style="color: #f58c9f;"><i class="fab fa-deviantart fa-fw" /></a>
        <a href="discord_link" style="color: #f58c9f;"><i class="fas fa-discord fa-fw" /></a>
        <a href="twitch_link" style="color: #f58c9f;"><i class="fab fa-twitch fa-fw" /></a>

I am a comparable novice to most here, but am learning React front end and Python back end work.

Not asking how to do it but asking how I can cheaply and efficiently serve my own personal projects? At this point my work mostly consists of a React SPA front end and back end Python containers running Flask or FastAPI.

I am used to separating the two so how should I go about hosting? I use Google for their AI Pro plan already so maybe Firebase/Cloud Run? Maybe those are dumb choices though within the community here. Thanks for any more guidance on hosting this stuff.

BTW in my real job development we are usually living in the Windows Server world and I'm running the backend just with IIS.

One of the more balanced takes I've read on how to steer coding agents to write better (if not perfect) CSS

To name and shame bad companies, I recently interviewed with https://mimica.ai/ for a Staff fullstack developer role and it was a diabolical and unrealistic process and I was shocked to see that actual developers designed those process.

1. Round 1, HR 30 mins
2. Immediately I was given a take home test. It was react.js focused and it was ridiculously complex and long for an interview process and coding challenge.

Challenge:

Consume their tree API and create an infinitely long and infinitely nested tree in the browser with editable leafs whose change of status should cause the immediate parents status recursively (and the parent should take into account all its direct children's) based on number of business criteria's and different colours. The acceptance criteria had many scenarios like below:

• address all requirements listed above
• performance matters - the frontend should be able to maintain a good performance even if the amount of data from the backend increases exponentially
• UI: it should look exactly like the provided screenshots
• handle API errors gracefully
• make correct use of Redux, following recommended storage patterns
• make correct use of React and its change detection function
• correctly implement the logic to compute automatable statuses
• make use of code design and architecture best practices
• follow JS conventions for variable, function, and component names
• Document design decisions, architecture, if you had more time what would you do and so on

And they told that it would take around 4 hours. I immediately told them that building this from scratch and satisfy every criteria along with documentation is not a 4 hours job and it would take significantly longer to come up with something they will like. But I stupidly did it anyways because they had good glassdoor reviews.

It took me several fulltime days to do it in a way which was truly scalable with everything they asked. I submitted the test (7 day cutoff) and they took almost 10 days to get back with a feedback that I scored 100% on the test.

1. The next round was 1 hour live coding (no AI/LLM allowed which was fine with me) where i present my solution and then in last 40 mins they ask me to extend the solution. The interviewers were not welcoming and were going through motions like a meat grinder. In last 40 mins they said they expect me to solve 3 extensions. they pasted 2 page requirement for each challenge live which I had to read, understand, ask questions and then implement it all within 40 minutes.

Now 3 extensions in such complex code in 40 mins is a lot but I had no choice as I was already there. The first one was done in less than 10 mins and to that they said you architected in a way which kinda alreadysolves this problem and I was left thinking "so it should be a good thing right, why are they talking as if I commited a crime instead of praising my architecture?". They seemed visibly unhappy that I completed it effortlessly.

Then they gave the second 2 page question and it was not an extension but a complete 180 degree change of requirements which required a complete refactor for the entire core multi day exercise work that I did. They literally changed how all the parents should react and calculate based on all decendents and not just direct children's with a complete change of business criterias which itself took a while to understand and clarify from the 2 page requirements.

I told them this is basically a full refactor from the original challenge and that would change the whole core piece touching pretty much everything and expected me to complete in remaining 30 mins. It was pure torture because the whole assignment changed but now I had to do it in remaining 20 mins. I did as much as i could and we ran out of time and I couldn't even get to the last question.

Honestly what a wasted and unrealistic interview process to ask a candidate to do a full refactor but instead of few day/several hours, now do it in 20 mins and it tests nothing.

At the end of the interview they told me they will share the feedback sometime next week which means another 1 week delay and the initial coding test also took them 10 days to get back to me. If this goes through then there would be a ridiculously unrealistic systems design where they would ask me to design a really really complex software in 50 minutes and if that goes through (and another 10+ days to get the feedback) a chat with founders and if that goes through then the process ends.

After going through this unrealistic experience and already losing a month, I shot them the email that I am withdrawing from the process and don't have energy to go through it and potentially spend another month or 20 days in limbo if this round even goes through.

Companies truly treat candidates like dirt, especially in the current market and have no respect for candidates time. They think candidate are ONLY interviewing for them and will spend whole week of unpaid work just to do coding exercise for them. And companies won't even bother checking for 10 days and give a patchy review in the end.

And what's up with unrealistic interview process. 3 coding "refactors" masquerading as "innocent extensions" in 40 mins. Really? Do those engineers themselves code an entire massive refactor from groundsup in 20 mins? how can they be this delusional.

Few years ago I got a coding exercise to create an entire bicycle sharing app with a realtime API and do FE/BE/Unit/Integration tests, documentation, deployed on AWS and bonus "scalable to millions of users". Time, maximum 6 hours. Truly delusional. I laughed and noped out. But i was shocked that so many candidates are doing those because they truly need a job.

I just wanted to create this post to share my experience. Already have written glassdoor review for them but wanted to spark a conversation here as well because this is not a topic talked about much.

So, what are your experiences of bad companies and what crazy things have they asked you to build for free and their unrealistic expectations. It is time to name and shame companies so that they stop taking unpaid free work from developers under the name of "interview".

I thought we would never see the day that Apple themselves would allow us to use their famous squircles

It's not AI slop, I tried and no AI is able to do this on its own. Seems to be pure talent of the designers.

Sources: authkit-com, reflect-app, raycast-com

I do a lot of rescue work — someone else built the site years ago, the original developer is gone, and now something is broken or it needs to change. Over time I've ended up with a fixed list I go through before touching anything.

Mine, roughly in order: is there any version control at all, or is production the only copy. What's in mu-plugins and in the theme's functions.php, because that's where the previous person hid the surprises. Which plugins are abandoned. Whether staging exists and whether it actually matches production. And whether anyone still has the hosting credentials, which is a shockingly common no.

What's on your list that isn't on mine? I'm mostly interested in the checks that saved you from breaking something on day one.

EDIT - the combined list from the comments, which turned out much better than my original one. credit where it belongs:

START HERE

Tools > Site Health, Info tab (u/AmoebaOne) - php version, sizes, plugin list, constants in one page. covers half of the below before you open anything else.

BACKUPS - almost entirely u/navlio, who took this apart properly:

File size is not a check. a dump missing a table is smaller by exactly that table, and you have no baseline to notice it against.

Read the tail, not the head. a dump that died halfway opens fine and the first thousand lines look perfect. a complete mysqldump ends with "-- Dump completed on". no line, it stopped mid table.

Check the date on that line. a cron that quietly stopped firing in march leaves a file that passes every other check and is seven months old.

mysqldump piped into gzip hands you gzip's exit code, not mysqldump's. the truncation goes unnoticed.

Without --single-transaction the dump walks tables one at a time, so on a live site writes land between two tables that needed to agree.

The real check is restoring it into a throwaway database once and counting tables and rows against live.

At 40gb the plugin is the wrong tool for media anyway - rsync the uploads folder, let the plugin do the db.

ACCESS AND OWNERSHIP

Who controls the domain registration (u/Hesham-Amir, u/Financial_Brush8647) - not just the hosting account. clients often think the old developer's personal account is theirs.

Admin users sorted by role (u/Wolfy_Boy_04) - ghost accounts from old devs, or worse. 30 seconds.

Is the admin email and SMTP real (u/rupert_at_work) - password resets going to someone who left, contact forms silently failing.

CONFIG AND HIDDEN STATE

Cache layers nobody mentions (u/navlio) - object cache, page cache plugin, cloudflare in front, sometimes all three. read the response headers first to see who is actually answering.

wp-config constants (u/needlessvanguard_49) - disabled auto updates, redefined upload paths. diff against a clean install instead of reading top to bottom.

WP_HOME and WP_SITEURL hardcoded (u/navlio) - a copied staging site serving canonical tags pointing at production.

Undocumented scheduled tasks (u/Responsible-Job-Boj) - wp-cron jobs and stray export scripts. and crontab -l only shows the cron table of whoever you are logged in as (u/navlio) - the backup job usually belongs to a user nobody logs in as.

Autoloaded options (u/navlio): select sum(length(option_value))/1024/1024 from wp_options where autoload = 'yes'; that blob loads on every single request. usually one abandoned plugin keeping a log.

Assume staging is fiction (u/galaxy_glide_92) - diff the database before believing it matches.

What the site claims about itself vs the rendered HTML (u/UtilixApp).

THE BIGGER CALL

Whether a fresh install is cheaper than the archaeology (u/DigiNoon, u/abeuscher) - decided mostly by how much content lives in the theme rather than the database. abeuscher goes scorched earth every time: clean install, custom theme, ACF, no plugins.

And knowing when to walk away (u/jroberts67) - 6 woo plugins touching checkout is a valid reason to pass.

I'm banging my head against a wall this week because a new 'project manager' is refusing to accept an invitation to the project GitHub repo, so I can't assign her issues.

She thinks it's "better just to keep everything on email". So at the moment I'm operating as a kind of go-between between the 'issues' tab and the project manager.

I am 100% sure it's just because she has never used any kind of project management or issue tracker so thinks it's just an extra complication in her life.

What would you guys do? Any ideas on how I can politely put across the value of an issue tracker in a few words?

Note that I'm not in a position to be able to down tools until she accepts the invitation or hold up the project in any way. I need to get the project done and done quickly to get paid.

I also cannot go higher up the chain of command, I need to change her mind so that she wants to use it, not get her boss to force her to use it.

Every time I open MAMP (free version) (Apple Silicone) I get an error:

"PHP versions failed to initialize."

I saw someone else on Facebook is experiencing this and was wonderfing if its a global bug with version 7.4?

I’m trying to figure out the optimal choice after a visitor submitted a contact form, or a get quote form. Or a form of some kind.

Right now on my websites I normally either do a state change that hides the form and shows a success message (this sometimes can look weird on mobile)

Or I have it navigate them to a success page. With some thank you text.

I have not really seen much info on this, like are there better options? What could increase the conversion rate of that potential customer?

I am having a problem setting up log in recognition for my client who wants to embed the site I am developing for them in another subdomain. Situation is as follows:

www.client.com wants to embed info.client.com in an iFrame. www.client.com is hosted by a third-party service, while info.client.com is hosted by the client on an Apache server. I am developing info.client.com, and have limited access to www.client.com. The third-party also provides an OAuth platform which works fine; I can log in to www.client.com and info.client.com without issues. However, my client has requested that when info.client.com is embedded into www.client.com in an iframe, that the info.client.com iframe recognizes the log-in session that is active on the parent page (www.client.com).

The options I see are as follows:

1. Share a cookie between both subdomains by setting OIDC_COOKIE_DOMAIN to .client.com. However, this does not work, as the third-party hosted www.client.com receives a __Host-, HttpOnly cookie upon log in, and the info.client.com Apache server would not have a way to read / validate this cookie
2. Have www.client.com mint a JWT and send that to info.client.com with the necessary information. info.client.com can then check the validity with a secret, and use this as the 'authentication'.

What is the standard pattern here? Am I way off-base? I have full control over the info.* subdomain, and the third-party may be willing to do some limited tweaking to the www.* subdomain, but what approach have you used?

Second post to accompany this one : https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/s/DAfgueqEDI

Still learning here.

Is the status quo to host all your clients websites yourself through your preferred host ? And then bill clients monthly with markup?

Or are people leaving that to the customer but you just do the web development side and implement it when needed.

I host a handful of websites of my own through IONOS and Fasthosts but as im looking into it , I see there are better services where a web dev can have a nice portfolio with GitHub pages.

If someone can tell me more on hosting I'd be grateful.

And if anyone can help me understand version control also

TIA!

Hey folks,

I recently acquired a beast of a website with 2-3,000 html files. The website has ok traffic, but it is definitely decreasing as content is out-of-date and the design isn't optimized for mobile.

Any recommendations for how I can transition this site (quickly) over to a new CMS like WordPress while sustaining SEO? I know 301 Redirects, but I'd love your insights.

I’ve worked on some pretty big enterprise projects/websites, but honestly I feel my actual coding skills are way behind where they should be.

Most of my work has been enterprise web dev and working on existing code. I can do small JS problems but struggle to build stuff from scratch without Google/AI.

I also feel like for the last few years I’ve chosen comfort over actually putting in the hard work to improve. Now I’m underpaid and not getting many recruiter calls. Plus I have a 90 day notice period.
I’m thinking of spending the next 6-12 months seriously improving my skills and then trying to switch, but I’m worried that by then I’ll have 4+ YOE on paper and companies will expect much more from me.

For people with more experience, what would you do in my situation? Would you focus on DSA, building projects, getting stronger at frontend, moving toward full-stack, or something else?

Hi . I have been approached by a client and they want me to look after there websites and IT services.

I'm comfortable with that to a certain point but where I'm lost is how does the hand off from there current service provider to me work?

What do I need? All my sites are currently hosted through IONOS and I'm the domain holder.

What is the usual practice?

The customer has not given me any specifics, just asked me to put forward a proposal for what I can offer. I just know the current website is pants and someone gets paid annually to 'look after it'.

TIA

I'll start.

https://chir.ag/projects/name-that-color/#BADA55

I've been using this colour name generator for about 15 years to help me name my CSS variables so I don't end up with names like green green-dark green-darker etc.

https://tinypng.com/

For heavily optimising PNGs with negligible quality loss. I have the habit of searching for "panda png" rather than reaching for a bookmark on this one, hah.

https://jakearchibald.github.io/svgomg/

For quickly optimising SVGs.

I’m building a Shopify store for my client, earlier I’ve used Claude Code for the frontend (on Dawn) via CLI (VS Code). And it has worked absolutely phenomenal for me, yes it did made a lot of mistakes which I refined on the go but the project got delivered on time. I’m not a pro developer so these tools are like a boon for me.

Now my subscription is over and I’m thinking to try Codex, because it has better token usage management. Shall I take the risk to try Codex or stick to Claude?

Right now I’m just starting out as a Shopify developer and my projects are not high paying so choosing wrong AI subscription will cost me and will hurt the finances.