BrowserID is a hot new way of signing in to your favorite web applications without the need of typing in your password for each website. It lets users sign in once through BrowserID and then use different websites that use BrowserID without typing in their details again and again (a quick guide is located here). This NodeJS service, soon to be renamed Mozilla Persona, is super easy to implement with a lightweight authentication module called Passport. For this tutorial, we’ll go through a whirlwind tour of BrowserID and Passport and hopefully, this will show you just how easy it is to use BrowserID in your application. This tutorial is uploaded as a Github Gist and is located here if you want to have a look at the code as a whole.

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Amazing World of Chat – Illustration by kdonovan_gaddy

Websockets is amazing technology in the new HTML5 specifications that allows for a new way of communicating between browsers and servers. Through this technology, applications can easily and quickly provide bi-directional communication in realtime. This allows developers to create all sorts of realtime applications (e.g. statistics, chat applications) without the need of relying on huge AJAX calls that continuously poll the server and take up large amounts of resources. With Socket.io, working with Websockets is astoundingly easy and works perfectly with the non-blocking and quick realtime server, NodeJS. Plus, with Socket.io, browser compatibility for Websockets is no longer an issue as it solves the problem by choosing whatever communication protocol available for the browser at hand. So, let’s have a peek at parts of an application that uses Socket.io, a program I am developing called LightChat. Continue reading →

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, NodeJS 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.
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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 →