Month: December 2020

How to Submit a Free Advertisement on Findit Classifieds – Free Local Classified Advertising

Findit Classifieds / Free Local Advertising

Findit Classifieds is a free local classified advertising platform built by me, in my spare time, over the last 23 years.

I started the website with my brother, Richard, back in 1997. Sadly, my brother past from cancer only 2 years in to the project and never got to see a completed product.

The last 4 years have been spent securing the server, completing the mobile first re-design and a basic implementation of the internal messaging system. All of this while taking on a new role as a senior developer at a start-up. It was insane!

January, 2021, marks the point where I can finally say I’ve completed the MVP or Minimum Viable Product of Findit Classifieds. At this point, it is time to scale the application and see what comes next. Build it to run and compete on the open market or sell out to investors or competitors?

Now that we have the MVP, I can show you how to register and submit free advertisements on one of the most secure classified advertising systems ever built.

The Metro Area Interface

The Metro Area interface is a custom framework I designed just for Findit Classifieds. It is based on public vs private information and levels of trust around what you share and with who with a focus on selling items and services locally.

The Metro interface has two implementations. Public URLs via subdomains. A good example of a public metro area is houston.finditclassifieds.com.

All advertisements in the Houston, Texas Metro area are publicly available to search engines and people via the public Metro area subdomain.

However, logging in to the secure version, https://www.finditclassifieds.com, users can see information reserved for registered users only in addition to the public data.

For instance, if you only wanted to share your phone number with registered users in your Metro Area, you would enter it in the contact info field which is reserved for registered users.

Step 1: Register / Verify Your Email Address

There is not much to registration other than verifying your email address and selecting a “Metro Area” you live in.

From any page on the website, click Register Now.

Find the register now link on any page.

Registration is simple and straight forward. Email address, name, Metro Area, City are all you need to complete registration. Once, you submit your information, an email validation link is sent to you.

Click on the link to verify you email and you are ready to start posting free advertisements.

More stuf

Classic ASP Sleep Function or How to Delay a HTTP Response in Classic ASP – Explanation & Alternative Solutions

Is There a Sleep Method in Classic ASP?

First, and sorry, there is no built in sleep method in classic Active Server Pages (ASP). Probably for good reason though. Keep reading for background on why and I’ll offer some possible alternatives.

VBScript Sleep Function Code Example

Normally, when I think of a sleep function, I think of the built-in VBScript Sleep Function where we can set a delay in seconds to pause some code in a function. 

WScript.Sleep(5000)
WScript.Echo("5 seconds have passed.")

What is Classic ASP?

Classic Active Server Pages (ASP) is VBScript interpreted rather than compiled on the IIS web server then converted into 100% HTML before it is delivered to the client / web browser in a HTTP call.

I’ll emphasize, with Classic ASP, the client never sees the underlying VBScript, only rendered HTML.

The Refresh Meta Tag / Wait vs. Sleep

An alterative to “Sleep” might be delay or wait. We can use the Meta Tag, “Refresh”, if you just need a web page to wait for a number of seconds before refreshing which includes redirecting the page on refresh to another URL.

You would include the meta refresh tag inside the web page’s head tags as shown in the code example below.

Meta Refresh Tag Example Code

<html>
    <head>
        <title>Meta Tag Refresh Example</title>
        <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5"; url="Test.html" />  
    </head>
    <body>
    </body>
<html>

Custom ASP Sleep Function Alternative

As a prerequisite, I can’t imagine why you would want to delay a Classic ASP page from being served to a user’s web browser for 10 seconds. That’s a long time to make a user wait but you can do anything with code.

I will warn you, if you cause the HTTP Response to delay for a User Agent like Google bot, Google will probably exclude your website from their search indexes so I typically would not do what I’m about to show you in practice on a website that needed any kind of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) friendliness.

Also, I would not recommend this approach as we are tying up the CPU while running this loop waiting for the time to change. Making this more of a weapon than a tool.

From a bad guy perspective, if you could get this code loaded and running on multiple pages with lots of traffic you could really degrade the performance of the server.

DIY Classic ASP Sleep Function?

With Classic ASP, since we don’t have a native sleep or delay method, we can just build our own. By default, I’m going to stay with a delay of specific number of seconds as our end goal.

I’m sure we can come up with a few ways to solve for this but this solution is mine.

Building the Sleep Function from Scratch

  • We will set some variables for a start time and a current time.
  • Then start a While Loop that watches for # of seconds we’ve chosen.
  • We update the current time at each iteration of the loop and check it at start of each loop iteration.
  • Once current time increments by 10 seconds, loop completes giving you a delay of specified seconds.

Classic ASP Sleep Function Code

<%
Sub Delay(intSeconds)
	StartTime = Now()
	CurrentTime = Now()
	While DateDiff("s",StartTime,CurrentTime) < intSeconds
		CurrentTime = Now()
	Wend
End Sub

Response.Write("Something<br>")
call Delay(10)
Response.Write("Something 10 seconds later")
%>

I hope this helps you if you were looking for a simple Classic ASP HTTP Response delay function but be careful how you use it.

~Cyber Abyss