Adactio: Links—Tagged with node

Indiekit

Paul’s indie web project is live!

Meet the little Node.js server with all the parts needed to publish content to your personal website and share it on social networks.

You can read the accompanying blog post.

Today’s Javascript, from an outsider’s perspective | Lea Verou

This is a damning and all-too typical example of what it’s like for someone to trying to get to grips with the current state of the JavaScript ecosystem:

Note that John is a computer scientist that knows a fair bit about the Web: He had Node & npm installed, he knew what MIME types are, he could start a localhost when needed. What hope do actual novices have?

I think it’s even worse than that. Not only are potential new devs being put off ever getting started, I know plenty of devs with experience who have pushed out by the overwhelming and needless complexity of the modern web’s toolchain. It’s like a constant gaslighting where any expression of unease is summarily dismissed as being the whinings of “the old guard” who just won’t get with the programme.

John gives up. Concludes never to touch Node, npm, or ES6 modules with a barge pole.

The End.

(Just watch as Lea’s post gets written off as an edge case.)

mathieudutour/medium-to-own-blog: Switch from Medium to your own blog in a few minutes

Following on from Stackbit’s tool, here’s another (more code-heavy) way of migrating from Ev’s blog to your own site.

An exercise in progressive enhancement - DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻

Hui-Jing talks through her process of building a to-do app on Glitch using a progressive enhancement mindset:

I found that HTML out-of-the-box takes care of a lot of things when it comes to collecting user inputs from the front-end, which resulted in much less code required. This is not to say client-side Javascript is bad, because the experience was smoother (and faster) when I used it for updating content.

indiekit | An IndieWeb publishing toolkit

Paul is making a micropub endpoint for static sites—very cool!

Web Push Notifications Demo | Microsoft Edge Demos

Push notifications explained using astrology. But don’t worry, there’s also some code, just in case you prefer your explanations to also include models that actually work.

I finally made sense of front end build tools. You can, too.

I still find the landscape of build tools completely overwhelming, but I found this distinction to be a useful way of categorising the different kinds of build tools:

Build tools do two things:

Install things

Do things

So bower, npm and yarn install things, whereas grunt, gulp, and webpack do things.

I think.

No space left on device – running out of Inodes – Ivan Kuznetsov

This blog post saved my ass—the Huffduffer server was b0rked and after much Duck-Duck-Going I found the answer here.

I’m filing this away for my future self because, as per Murphy’s Law, I’m pretty sure I’ll be needing this again at some point

Progressive Progressive Web Apps - Tales of a Developer Advocate by Paul Kinlan

Paul goes into detail describing how he built a progressive web app that’s actually progressive (in the sense of “enhancement”). Most of the stuff about sharing code between server and client goes over my head, but I understood enough to get these points:

the “app shell” model is not the only—or even the best—way of building a progressive web app, and
always, always, always render from the server first.

Creating my first HTTP server in node.js | Charlotte Jackson, Front-end developer

Charlotte’s step-by-step account of setting up a Node server is going to be invaluable if and when I get around to dipping my toes in those waters.

Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers

Speaking as an ancient web developer myself, this account by Gina of her journey into Node.js is really insightful. But I can’t help but get exhausted just contemplating the yak-shaving involved in the tooling set-up:

The sheer number of tools and plugins and packages and dependencies and editor setup and build configurations required to do it “the right way” is enough to stall you before you even get started.

ZEIT – Next.js

I haven’t made a website with React, but if and when I do, this Node.js framework looks like it aligns nicely with my priorities. It’s all about the universal JavaScript (the artist formerly known as isomorphic JavaScript).

React Isomorphic Demo

It is possible to use React without relying completely on client-side JavaScript to render all your content—though it’s certainly not the default way most tutorials teach React. This ongoing tutorial aims to redress that imbalance.

Besides the main benefit of server rendering giving faster page loads, it also enables large amounts of the site to run without JavaScript. There are many reasons why you would want this, but my personal reasons are that it allows you to completely drop support JavaScript in older browsers, but still have the site function.

Node: Up and Running

One of these days I’m going to step outside of my PHP comfort zone and actually build something in Node. One of these days. When I do, this book looks like a good place to start (and the online version is free).

Universal React ◆ 24 ways

I have no hands-on experience with React, but this tutorial by Jack Franklin looks like a great place to start. Before the tutorial begins he succinctly and clearly outlines the perfect architecture for building on the web today:

The user visits www.yoursite.com and the server executes your JavaScript to generate the HTML it needs to render the page.

In the background, the client-side JavaScript is executed and takes over the duty of rendering the page.

The next time a user clicks, rather than being sent to the server, the client-side app is in control.

If the user doesn’t have JavaScript enabled, each click on a link goes to the server and they get the server-rendered content again.

YES!!!

Y’know, I had a chance to chat briefly with Jack at the Edge conference in London and I congratulated him on the launch of a Go Cardless site that used exactly this technique. He told me that the decision to flip the switch and make it act as a single page app came right at the end of the project. I think that points to a crucial mindset that’s reiterated here:

Now we’ll build the React application entirely on the server, before adding the client-side JavaScript right at the end.

Link tags: node

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