Let's go and rant a little somewhere.
So, I released to the wild today an experimental little site: catharted info . The rules there are simple: rant a little, read other rants, watch them disappear forever. The source is open and you're free to browse it in the github repository.
My reasons for building this site were two:
Have a place for occasional ranting: oftentimes I've found myself wanting to say something, to broadcast something just to get it off my chest, like a complaint or a very offensive joke or remark. But let's face it, even in those dire times, when we dare not say what we want to anyone, we'd like the secret satisfaction of knowing that it would not be a total scream into the void if we say it to ourselves, someone, somewhere, must hear it too. And it would be cool also that that someone doesn't know us by our voice, so we don't have to face the sour regret of the consequences. Being an internet citizen, a frequent web traveler and a lover of the written media, I have always wanted a place just like that: broadcast stuff with no regrets, a venting site, the internet's pillow. So, being bored and sleep deprived, instead of googling for it, I made it, thus fulfilling this need of mine and also my second purpose:
Experiment with node.js in the wild: I'm working on a formal node.js project, but I wanted to see how hard it was to create a little site and deploy it. So I set up to it. First I'll talk about the deployment, because the development is longer and would probably bore you guys.
The deployment story
First and foremost, my total investment so far has been of three bucks: the .info domain names are on sale on namecheap and a some really cool dude is offering free VPS servers for node.js developers for the hosting. Maybe later he'll charge me for it, or I'll have to use one of the linode instances I have access to, but, for now, I rolled up the site in less than a week's worth of late-nights and put it up the internerd for less than a beer's price. Not that I drink, though.
This was the most obscure phase, as I found lots of alternatives: some people say that you should use upstart, others, that you should use spark, some others, that you should do weird stuff that bored me while reading .
After all, what you want is two things: to have a way to run the node process as a dæmon and automatically reload it when crashing and to have a way to have access to the node server via a normal web server. It would also be nice to have a way of redirecting the standard output and standard error streams to a log file.
I went with the fastest solution : using nginx for reverse proxying and monit, for not letting the process crash.
The development story
If you've never heard about node.js, go check it out now. I can wait.
Did you check it out? Isn't it mega rad? You didn't? Ok, no problem, let me summarize it for you: non-blocking, event based, low-resource consuming server technology. Also, server side javascript, that's right, with it you don't have to think in two languages for client/server development
I created the app with the express.js framework. It's inspired by sinatra, the simple framework for ruby and built over the connect middleware stack. I must say that the documentation is a little obscure or lacking sometimes, but it must be that I am spoiled by the django documentation, which is like super complete. I had a hard time with some stuff, like getting post requests to work and error handling. For the former, after poking around in some projects, I discovered that I needed a middleware to decode the body of the post requests, so I added app.use(connect.bodyDecoder()); to the server code in the app and that was that. For error handling, I followed the example in the author's github repository, but that only did it for server errors, I'm still quite at loss as how to manage Not found errors. Oh, and those examples are handy, check 'em out.
The main reason for using a framework was that I like templates for my pages. And I am a new convert to haml (though I still don't know how to do inline markup -stuff like <p>you know <em>this</em> kinds of things). For that, I found that there were two haml implementations for javascript, haml.js and haml-js. The author of the former is also the express.js framework author, and he says his version is better and has some numberly looking numbers to prove it, so I believed him. But, alas, if you install haml.js with npm (the node package manager) the command would be sudo npm install hamljs so in your express apps you'd have to set the engine to hamljs, not haml -with something like this app.set('view engine', 'hamljs');- and also name your templates with the extension .hamljs instead of .haml. If you install with kiwi, though, there shouldn't be a problem because the command would be kiwi install haml.
Also, for stylesheets I used sass, because I liked the idea of having functions, mixins and variables. I'm aware that there are node.js modules for sass, but I just used the command line utility, 'cause I don't like to do stuff client side every time that I could perfectly do one time, server side.
For the client side, I used jquery, 'cause I used it like forever and it's the fastest for DOM queries
So, check it out and rant a little. Or start your own node.js development adventure, it's fun!
Also, if it crashes or you kinda hate it, let me know, after all nothing done in a couple of days is flawless.