server-side couchdb access using classic ASP

Once in a while some new technology pops up that makes me want to experiment a little. CouchDB is one of these technologies. If you haven’t heard of CouchDB before, Matt Aimonetti has a neat presentation on it over on slideshare.

Although I’m trying to find out what programming language to dive into next (python and c# being my main candidates), I’m still most proficient in classic ASP.

Now the interesting thing about CouchDB is that it’s API’s are in javascript. Querying is done by javascript and it returns JSON (Javascript Object Notation) objects as results. The people at couchDB have included a client-side javascript library to interface to the database client-side, so directly from a browser. Now that’s nice and all, In theary this allows you to build a web-app totally client-side, but I’d really like my data access code on the server, where it’s not visible to everyone.

Classic asp ofcourse has javascript support built-in, so ironically, classic asp is a language that lends itself quite well by default to talk to CouchDB server-side. So one of the oldest web-languages is (unintentionally) one of the most fit to talk to one of the latest database technologies.

Anyway, it seems I’m not the first one that figured this out, and I found an extended version of the javascript library included with CouchDB, by Nathan Smith. This is already something that’s directly useable from ASP. You can include the script in your server-side ASP page, and talk to a couchDB database.

I needed to take this one step further though, I wanted this library encapsulated in a .WSC file. If you’ve read some of my other posts, you know I use wsc’s to create objects in ASP, so the spaghetti-code argument a lot of people have against classic ASP is no longer valid.
The thing with WSCs is that, unlike includes, you can conditionally use them. An include in an ASP file has a lot of overhead, because it is, by default, always included. The server includes the file, and then the ASP interpreter goes ahead and processed the page. In a WSC you can keep your code separate from your ASP pages and conditionally (I.E. in an if…then statement) load them. Anyway, let’s not get sidetracked here.

It was kind of hard to encapsulate the code the way I wanted to, ideally  I would have the WSC and use it like so:

var couchdb;
couchdb=GetObject("script:"+Server.MapPath("/~components/couchdb.wsc"));
couchdb.allDbs();
var newDb = couchdb.createDb('testdb');
....

Instead, I had to have a function in the WSC that creates a new object and internally instantiates and returns the couchDBserver object. The code now looks like this:

var couchdb;
couchdb=GetObject("script:"+Server.MapPath("/~components/couchdb.wsc"));
var server = new Object();
server = couchdb.server("http://192.168.2.197:5984");
server.allDbs();

Also, I haven’t figured out yet how to use the library using VBscript instead of javascript, but the proof of concept is there. The code is hosted on launchpad, so it can be looked at and improved upon.

Please note that the code needs a couchDB database set up somewhere. I have done this by installing it on my linux laptop and running it from there. The ASP code runs on my Windows workstation. The installation of CouchDB on Windows seems to be quite cumbersome still, so a separate machine (this could also be a virtual machine) is propably the simplest way to go at this point in time.

If you have an improvement or something nice you’ve done with this library, please share in the comments, or better yet, on launchpad. I’m curious to see if I’m the only living classic ASP developer left tinkering with this stuff :)

When a cover becomes better than the original

While I’m posting video’s anyway, I thought I’d publish my favorite one too. This is a video of Matt Weddle of a band called Obadiah Parker, performing Outkast’s “Hey Ya” acoustically. It’s too bad the sound-quality isn’t great, but still… This rendition made me play the video over and over and over again. Enjoy.

UPDATE: The video can also be seen on YouTube, but I couldn’t embed the youtube video in my blog (the owner prevents this video from being embedded), so if the Google video doesn’t work you’ll have to click the link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-8nkkOA_AM

Hug a developer

Finally

A video that says it all. A video that touches on the problem us developers have to face day in and day out. The message is clear. Hug a developer. Do it today. We really need it.

Bazaar and Windows part II

As promised, a little update on how bazaar is working for me under Windows. As it turns out, the plans I had for implementing SVN at work are now obsolete, I liked bazaar so much, we are now using it at work as well.

In the last post we saw how to create a local repository and see some changes between that and your working copy. All nice, but what if you’re not solo’ing a project? Most of the time, you’ll have a development server, maybe even a testing server available. In my case, I have a central server set up from which I run my local websites. I have a local DNS and that simplifies webdevelopment a lot. I have URL’s to all my projects I can use internally.

Anyway, what you probably want, is for your server to contain the main project, work locally on that project and when you’re done editing your branch, publish it back to the server. What I did to accomplish that is to go to my server and into the WWW root. My server is setup much the same way as my workstation (see last post). In my wwwroot are all the websites I’m currenty working on, so the thing to do here is cd into one of them and use the exact same procedure as described in the last post, to create a new project.

Okay then, we have a working repository on a shared server. The next step is to go to your local workstation and go into the wwwroot there. According to Bazaar’s documentation it should be possible to create a new branch from a remote location using different protocols (FTP, SFTP, HTTP, BZR and FILE). To be honest with you, the only one that worked for me right away was FILE. I have FreeSSHD set up on my server and I tried SFTP using that, but the branch command, after asking for my password, just gave me a cryptic:

Authentication (password) successful!
Secsh channel 1 opened.
[chan 1] Opened sftp connection (server version 3)
bzr: ERROR: Operation unsupported

After that, I though I’d try branching via HTTP, this is read-only, bazaar does not (yet) support writing back revisions to a webserver, but alas, another cryptic error:

“bzr: ERROR: Not a branch: “http://[URL to my project]/”.

I can imagine this being a showstopper for people, but I had another option to try, the FILE protocol. (I admit I haven’t sought out any help on this in the bazaar community, so if someone finds out how to use SFTP with freeSSHD under windows, leave me a message.) UPDATE: This seems to be  a problem with freeSSHd, using CopSSH on Windows works!

I have a share on my workstations to the wwwroot on my server, mapped to my local W: disk, so I used

bzr branch w:\pure.precompiled.local\

This created a branch of the project on the server on my local machine. Yay!. So now we can develop locally, commit locally, and when we like what we’ve done, push it to the server. For a quick test, open up your editor, edit a file and save. Now use

bzr status

You’ll see that you have (a) modified file(s). Suppose you are happy with your changes, you can commit them (locally) into a revision.

bzr commit -m “edited the title”

Nice, we now have a local revision 2. Now I’d like to see that revision pushed to the server:

bzr push w:\pure.precompiled.local –remember

The –remember option makes sure bazaar remembers where to push changes. If all went well, bazaar should say:

All changes applied successfully.
Pushed up to revision 2.

Quickly pointing my browser to http://pure.precompiled.local; and presto! My server shows me the version with the pagetitle changed.

Now this is all very nice, working locally, commiting locally and then pushing to the server. But if you work with a central server there is an easier way.

Type: “bzr bind w:\pure.precompiled.local” to bind your local repository to the server’s repository. What this does is make sure that any commit is done locally as well as on the central server, at the same time. So there’s no need to use “bzr push” anymore.

To work like this there are only a few key commands to use:

1. bzr update – updates your local repository with any new changes on the server
2. bzr commit – commit your local changes locally and to the server

This is the way I work now at home (solo) and at work (in a team). There is one caveat: the commit to the server doesn’t UPDATE the files on the server. So your changes are stored on the server, but the files on the server stay the way they are until you run “bzr update” locally on the server. There are a few plugins that claim to be a way around this, but for me it’s just a minor problem. I scheduled a bzr update to run every day at work so our server can be looked at by our test-team. If we need an immediate update, I run it manually, no biggie.

In the meantime I made a bazaar toolbar for homesite that lets me do these things and more in a GUI directly from homesite. It’s not really polished, but when I come around to that I’m thinking of posting it on launchpad. If anyone is interested right now, leave me a message.

Happy versioning!

Bazaar, Araxis Merge, Homesite and Windows

As promised, some more info on how I’m getting along using Bazaar as my VCS of choice under windows, using homesite for classic ASP development.

Let’s start with the basics, there are two possible ways of installing Bazaar under Windows; installing the version for Python, or installing a standalone .EXE with Python “built-in”. Not all plugins work with the standalone version, but I installed it anyway, because it’s an easier install. Also, it shouldn’t be too hard to uninstall the standalone version and install Python and Bazaar for Python later on, if the need arises.

After installing Bazaar, you should be able to start bazaar from any command prompt. So start a command line (for example by using Start…run… and typing ‘cmd’) and type ‘bzr [ENTER]‘. You should get a general explanation of Bazaar’s most used functions. If not, try rebooting. Bazaar should have added itself to your PATH environment variable. This way bzr.exe is found no matter where you type it in a DOS prompt. Sometimes it takes a reboot for Windows to see a new addition to the environment variables.

If you verified that Bazaar can be started, it’s time to set up your workstation. Usually, when working with a version control system, you work on your local machine. In webdevelopment, this is a little trickier than in application development, but not a lot. The workstation version of Windows (XP pro, 2000 workstation) DOES have the irritating limitation within IIS of 10 concurrent users and only one active site at any time. For developing a website, this is usually not a problem. There are a few tools that can run in your tray and allow you to switch between sites easily. I use IISadmin.NET myself, but there are more. Using a tool like this makes developing on your local machine quite do-able.

If you have installed and configured Internet Information services (IIS) on your workstation, you can go to the wwwroot (c:\inetpub\wwwroot\ by default) and create a few folders for your different projects (that’s the way I work, YMMV). Set them up in the IIS console and fill the folders with your files. This is just plain old setting up IIS, I won’t go into that, there are enough sites explaining the procedure. Now, say for example I have a site called “pure”. I have the folder “pure” created under C:\inetpub\wwwroot\ and I have added my html/asp/js/css files to it. I activated the site in Windows IIS console (set the root folder to “C:\inetpub\wwwroot\pure\”), started the site and I checked to see if it worked by going to http://localhost/. Congratulations, you are now developing locally.

Anyway, back to the repository. Say I want to version-control this site with Bazaar. The first thing to do in Bazaar is to let bazaar know you want to version-control this directory. Start a command prompt, change directories to the folder you want to version-control, and initialise Bazaar:

cd C:\inetpub\wwwroot\pure
bzr init

Bazaar will have created a hidden folder called .bzr in the directory, and this is the only extra folder that it creates (As opposed to Subversion that creates a .svn folder in ALL your subdirectories aswell). This folder is actually your local repository. Now we’re ready to let bazaar know what files we want in this crispy new repository:

bzr add

You will see bazaar recurse through the subfolders of ‘pure’ and add all the files it finds. (You can exclude certain files if you wish, check the bazaar user manual to find out how). Okay, we’re still not done yet, bazaar knows what files to track, but these files have no ’state’ yet. To give them an initial state, commit them to the repository by typing:

bzr commit -m "Initial import"

This will add the files in their current form into the repository. Always use the -m option to give your commit action a short description. This is version control 101; You have to know what you’ve done to any changed files, the comment after -m lets you describe what you’ve done.

Now, the advantage of working on a local webserver is that you have now already published the repository! If you have the .bzr file in the root of the ‘pure’ folder, it means that it can be reached from any other location that can reach your workstation via HTTP. You’ll have to decide for yourself what the security implications are in your situation, but for me this is a plus. I have a few workstations and a server, and this allows me to quickly pull a repository from my workstations.

Now, fire up homesite if you will and edit some of the files. Maybe even get some serious work done while you’re at it. After you’ve changed a couple of things and saved them, switch back to the command prompt and type:

bzr status

If all went wel, bazaar will tell you what has changed since your initial import. If you are happy with your work, tested it and you want to start on your next task or bug, you can commit these changes:

bzr commit -m "fixed a bug"

Bazaar will tell you what revision you’ve just commited and you can start with a clean slate (a new revision) for your next work (you can check this by running bzr status again, nothing will show up). Now to demonstrate what bazaar can do, you might want to check the difference between your current version and revision 1:

bzr diff -r1

You will see what has changed, in which files, by who and at what time. I have to admit though that this isn’t quite friendly to read. Not everything has to be command-line based though, and although Bazaar is, your DIFF/MERGE tool doesn’t have to be. I use Araxis Merge myself, and there is a plugin for bazaar that lets you use your own visual DIFF tool. For araxis merge do the following (after installing it ofcourse)

Install the Difftools GUI plugin (just copy the folder in the ‘plugins’ directory of bazaar: C:\Program Files\Bazaar\plugins\)

Add araxis merge to the PATH environment variable
Windows needs to be able to find the Araxis executable even if the command prompt is in an entirely different directory. Adding the folder to your PATH environment variable will do just that. To do this right-click on the computer icon on your desktop and choose ‘manage’. On the ‘advanced’ tab there’s a button ‘environment variables’. Click it and add “C:\Program Files\Araxis\Araxis Merge v6.5;” to the PATH variable under “system variables”. (Check the path, this is for MY version of Araxis Merge). Reboot or log out/in after changing the variable, or else Windows won’t pick it up.

Configure araxis to ignore .bzr folders
Araxis needs to ignore the .bzr folder for it to work correctly. You can do this in Araxis itself under “view…options…filters”. Just add a type “exclude”, matches “folders” and pattern “.bzr”

Now try it by using the following command:

bzr diff --using consolecompare.exe -r1

This should give you all the changes neatly summed up in araxis. To make things even easier, you can create an alias for comparing in araxis. You can create command aliases in the bazaar.conf file. You can find this file in windows under “C:\Documents and Settings\[YOUR USERNAME]\Application Data\bazaar\2.0″
Just edit the file with a text-editor and add the following lines:

[ALIASES]
vdiff=diff --using consolecompare.exe

Now try it by typing the following statement in the command prompt:

bzr vdiff -r1

Pretty easy he?
well that’s enough for one evening. I’ll post the rest of my experiences with bazaar under windows in a next post.

Version control

During the last few days I’ve been looking into version control systems for use with my projects at work as well as at home. In the past I have used Microsofts Visual Sourcesafe in combination with Homesite. This works fine, create a project in Homesite, link VSS as the Source Control software and Homesite shows you what’s checked in, what’s checked out and the world is a happy place. This works because Visual Sourcesafe has an interface called SCC. Homesite supports SSC, but unfortunately not a lot of other versioning systems have an SCC interface.

Ofcourse, VSS costs money, and lately there have been more than a few open source competitors gaining momentum. Looking into them I found that version control seems to be focused on linux more than on windows. Cool new systems like Bazaar, Mercurial and Git have little or no support for windows. I know my friend Tjarko over at Carlos Gallupa uses Subversion, but that needs apache, and I really feel uncomfortable installing a complete webserver for the sole purpose of hosting a repository.

Bazaar and Mercurial look promising, because they are Distributed VCS’s instead of regular VCS’s like SourceSafe or Subversion. Branching is much easier in DVCS software. For an excellent explanation of the differences, look here. I’m really leaning towards Bazaar or Mercurial for that reason, especially at work, it would be nice to create branches and revisions on-the-fly.

The biggest problem is the lack of windows clients for both systems, let alone integration into Homesite. Oh well, probably I’m a little ahead of the game again. Maybe I should just try subversion and try mercurial or bazaar when the tools for windows appear… Or I could use Homesite under WINE and use a linux GUI :)

update:

In the end I decided on Subversion at work, as we can work with a central repository there. There is a pretty painless server setup for subversion called Visual SVN server. It includes a Windows MMC tool for managing your repositories and the apache server is included and installed automagically.

On the client side I found there is an SCC plugin available for subversion. So using it from Homesite and later on from Visual Studio should not be a problem.

At home I decided to go the bazaar route. I think programmers should really not care about using the command line, I’m figuring it out as I go along. In a next post I’ll give you my findings and some pointers on using bazaar under windows.

Tools of the webdevelopment trade

Having to re-install my PC at work the other day made me realize what a diversity of little tools I use to do what I do. I decided to make a list, so here goes.

- Homesite

Still my editor of choice. For working in classic ASP nothing beats it, not even Visual Studio 2xxx (of which the new versions don’t support classic asp anymore) or dreamweaver (too much WYSIWYG). It really is too bad there’s no replacement under linux. I’ve tried different editors and none have vbscript highlighting. Propably the one that comes closest (and the one I’m using right now under linux) is Komodo Edit. (which is open source now by the way). Eclipse is a little too bloated and slow to my taste.

- Toptools

Every webdeveloper needs a colorpicker, screenruler and screengrabber, especially in the beginning of a project when the design has to be made into XHTML/CSS. I used to have these tools seperate, and I was especially fond of screenruler. But recently I discovered toptools. It has all of these little tools in one handy free package that runs in your tray.

- Royal TS

To quickly log into remote webservers and SQL servers, this little gem unites all of your terminal server connections and lets you manage them from one interface. It saves settings and password per connection if you want and you can categorize everything. Oh and it’s free :)

- Launchy

Launchy is really one of my favorites, not especially for webdevelopment, but on the whole. It is a tool that let’s you quickly start any application in your taskbar. Pressing alt+space gives you a textbox and you can start typing the name of the program you need. It autocompletes the name, so as soon as you see the complete name, press ‘enter’ to start it. This really saves time, because you don’t need a mouse at all. Also, it ‘learns’ what programs you use more often and they come to the top of the list. The other thing it let’s you do is use special commands like “wikipedia”, pressing tab then lets you type any keywords you’d like to search for on wikipedia. It has more plugins, but I suggest you just try it out, I guarantee you will be hooked.

- FreeSSHD and winSCP/puTTY

For people that dislike terminal server or need access to linux machines, theres an alternative. FreeSSHD is a service you can install and run on a Windows machine. It gives you file transfer and a secure shell to log into from the outside. To do that from windows you can use winSCP in combination with puTTY. WinSCP gives you Secure File Copy and SFTP, which is much safer than regular FTP. PuTTY lets you log into the SSH server and gives you a command prompt. This setup has actually saved me a trip to one of my servers a few times. I used to manage a server that didn’t completely reboot after installing windows updates. It closed most running services (including Terminal Server services) and after that it gave up rebooting. The result being that I couldn’t connect to it anymore and the machine still hadn’t rebooted. After installing FreeSSHD I could still connect to the command prompt with puTTY, after the machine got stuck, and manage the server from there.
By the way, another thing freeSSHD allows you to do is tunnel any service in a secure sockets layer.

- Inkscape

Inkscape is actually an open source vector program, like Illustrator, but it allows me to quickly create a flowchart or a diagram. So that’s mainly what I use it for. The files it creates are saved as SVG, so if you make use of SVG in your work, you could also use it to create SVG and integrate it in your websites. I don’t really use advanced UML tools, so for the simple stuff inkscape is great. If anyone can recommend a good UML tool (preferrable free), let me know.

- Photoshop

The photo-editor to rule them all. It’s an expensive piece of software, but once you get to know it (or the 10% of it you’re likely to use), you’re hooked. I had Photoshop classes in school and every employer I’ve had since made use of it, luckily. There’s not much you can’t do with Photoshop. I’ve tried GIMPshop under linux and Windows, but it just doesn’t come close enough…

- SQL server / SQL manager

This is the SQL server client tool. It allows you to create, edit and query data in SQL server. Not really exiting, but I need it because almost all the database work is done in SQL server. If you’re looking for a free alternative, I can recommend mySQL, which also has nice management tools, works under windows and seems to be a pretty fast database. By the way, the upcoming version of SQL management tools (2008) has intellisense, which is very nice.

- Mozilla Firefox | webdeveloper toolbar | FireBug

Firefox is the browser I focus on first when creating a webpage. If it works in Firefox, I tweak it to work in IE , Safari and Opera (if need be). Firefox just has the nicest tools for debugging CSS and javascript. The webdeveloper toolbar gives you a lot of handy tools to quicky trobleshoot any layout issues you might have. Firebug is a javascript debugger. Internet explorer has a similar webdeveloper toolbar, but IE’s javascript debugging sucks like a black hole. If you want an even more advanced javascript debugger in Firefox, you might want to take a look at Venkman. I find Firebug does the job for me almost always, though.

- prototype

Not really a tool, but I thought I’d mention it anyway. Prototype is a library you can use in your webpages to simplify Javascript programming and take care of any cross-browser issues in Javascript. There are a lot of libraries around these days, like jQuery and the Yahoo Javascript libraries, but I started out using prototype and I really liked it. I tried making the switch to jQuery once, but I came back to prototype. I guess this is just a matter of taste, however, if you’re on a big project, it’s probably a good idea to use a javascript library to simplify your programming.

- lookout for outlook

At work, I’m forced to work with Outlook, which isn’t too bad, but I prefer Mozilla Thunderbird at home. Anyway, a really nice tool for searching your Outlook mail is Lookout. Originally developed by Lookoutsoft, this company was bought by Microsoft, so Microsoft could integrate it into Outlook themselves. Soon after that Microsoft brought out Windows Desktop Search, a tool that can search though all data on your local computer. However, I have tried MS desktop Search to search my Outlook e-mail and I just couldn’t get it to work. Lookout just works… It’s fast and using keywords like from: and to: you can specify exactly what mails you want to filter out. Microsoft has deleted all references to lookout on its site, but the link in the title of this chapter still seems to work.

- ToDoList

I’ve been looking long and hard for some sort of project-management tool, and for development this little gem seems to have most of the things I need. It’s open-sourced, so that’s a plus, also, it has features like prioritizing, setting due dates, assigning tasks to different people, time-tracking and the possibility to use it among a group of people. At work we have an existing web-based system for bug-tracking and ToDolist integrates with systems like this by letting you create a button and setting an ID for a task. Pressing the button launches a browser and you can set it to go to your web-based bugtracker with the ID as a parameter. Very nice, especially in a small company or for a freelancer where bugzilla or something similar might be too much.

A warning to classic ASP programmers

I have been working on a very large corporate web application using ASP/WSC. The application was very fast and performance was not an issue.
UNTIL we updated our servers a few months ago. Performance went down 400% and IIS hung and crashed very often. The asp pages were slow and unresponsive.

We have been working our butts of to solve the problem, de-installing servicepacks for windows and sql server and in the end re-installing complete servers.
We noticed the difference in the end when we had one IIS server that was fast and had a few updates that another IIS server missed.

These updates were:
- .net 2.0
- .net 3.0
- internet explorer 7 (includes microsoft windows script 5.7)
- msxml6

Although we are not 100% sure which one of these updates breaks classic asp (or at least cripples it), we are fairly sure it is the new vbscript.dll 5.7 distributed with IE7.
I also am not sure if this problem only arises when you use WSC’s in your ASP code or if it is a generic problem in classic asp.
Anyway, removing these four updates resulted in our asp / wsc application accelerating back to the performance we were used to and to the crashes in IIS stopping.

So please if you use classic asp, be careful to install IE7 on your IIS server. At least check performance levels.
Hope this message helps anyone struggling with the same problem, as we were unable to find any leads towards a solution.

I’d also like to hear if any other people are running into these problems and can verify the solution. Specifically, I am curious if this problem only happens on asp using WSC objects, or if it also happens on classic asp websites without the use of WSC.

The all new ASPimage plugin for tinyMCE

UPDATE 2009/05/20: A lot of people have been asking me for the version of TinyMCE that works with the ASPImage plugin. I have put it up for download here. This zip file contains both TinyMCE aswell as ASPImage, and is tested to work.

UPDATE 2008/06/21: It seems that the newer versions of Tiny (3.0.8+ ?) have a different plugin-implementation AGAIN. i’m not sure why this implementation has changed twice between 3.0Beta and 3.0.8, but I have no time to keep re-writing the plugin. So I suggest if you want to make use of ASPimage, you’ll have to either re-write it to work with later versions (and let me know, please, I’m interested too) or keep using Tiny 3.0, sorry guys.

Some time ago I wrote a little plugin for tinyMCE to be able to upload images onto the server from tiny. It worked with some free upload-code in ASP and the world was a good place. I put it on my site for the world to see and download, until some time later I started getting e-mails from people saying they couldn’t install the plugin. One of the e-mails said that the way plugins were done in tinyMCE had changed substantially. Now, until yesterday I still used the older version of tinyMCE that I used in the beginning, but for one of my latest projects I decided to download the new version.

Lo and behold, indeed the plugin was borked. tinyMCE 3 did change plugins substantially. So I took some time and changed the plugin to work with the new tinyMCE releases. You might also like to hear that the code was cleaned up and simplified substantially (remember fellow coders: if you look back at your code from the past, and you still think it’s perfect, you haven’t made any progress). Also, all translations are now in place for the English language, so the whole thing is properly translated too.

Anyway, the reason you’re here: the new ASPimage plugin.

UPDATE: After a few remarks from people using this plugin I found out that the plugin was based on an Alpha version of TinyMCE 3.0. It seems the plug-ins needed to be adjusted for the final version. I have done so, the plugin is now tested with TinyMCE 3.0 release date 2008-01-30, so please download it again if you still have the old version.

And to prove it really works, I took a screenshot for you :)

Seriously though, if there still are people with problems getting it to work, leave a comment or send me an e-mail.

Heroes

The biggest problem with (most) MMORPGs is the monthly fee. That doesn’t prevent millions of people from playing World of Warcraft, however, but is IS a pain. I like to play a game daily some weeks, and not at all the next week. In the latter case 12 Euros a month kinda sucks. Now I’m not a big WOW fan, a little too much fantasy for me. I’ve played Star wars : galaxies in the past, which was quite fun, until they decided to bring out the expansion pack you had to buy on top of the monthly fee to be able to travel beyond your current planets. No way.

I’ve stopped MMORPG’s now for a while, due to lack of time, but the last one I played (and propably the forst one I’ll pick up again if I feel like it again) is City of Heroes (or City of Villains, if you consider yourself more of a bad boy or girl.) It’s a classic MMORPG in a city full of heroes and villains. Choose your own type of hero, powers and outfit. I’ve made a few screenshots back in the time I was still playing:

Behold “The Rico Factor”: