Lock and Key – Photo by Bohman (Flickr) [CC-BY 2.0]

Connecting to social networks is nearly a must have for every new fangled website in the works. And increasingly, many websites are using OAuth authentication of other social networks to log in to their websites, thereby alleviating users of the need to remember a separate username and password for your website. Using Node, it is surprisingly easy to hookup to your favourite social network with the node module, Everyauth.  So, without further ado, let’s demonstrate how to log into a website using Twitter. Continue reading →

The combination of CoffeeScript, Node.js and CouchDB as a language, a server-side environment and database isn’t just amazingly cool and hip. It’s cool and hip for a reason. And that reason is because it is outrageously simple and blazingly fast to write a very cool web application. But as fast and simple as it is, tutorials and documentation are somehow lacking or non-existent and following them just leave beginners frustrated. So here is a comprehensive tutorial on building a simple blog made with CoffeeScript, Node.js and CouchDB. It’s not really for professionals but great for the curious and hobbyists who want to move from more traditional server-side technologies to Node.
Continue reading →

Mmmmm… HTML5 – Photo by slavic_V

HTML5 and its lovely brother CSS3 are both very fun and easy to use and produces wonderful results. That is, until your client views your beautifully designed and coded site in the dreaded Internet Explorer. Audio and video elements don’t work, things go all over the place and don’t even mention the word semantics because I’m sorry, IE does not understand! Fortunately, there are many lifesaving ways to allow our sites to fallback on previous methods, or to “degrade” gracefully – so you wouldn’t notice there’s a difference. Keep reading to find out 5 ways of falling forward! Continue reading →