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This Node.js tutorial series will help you build a Node.js-powered real-time chatroom web app fully deployed in the cloud. In this series, you will learn how to setup Node.js on your Windows machine (or just learn the concepts if you’re on Mac), how to develop a web frontend with Express, how to deploy a node express apps to Azure, how to use Socket.IO to add a real-time layer, and how to deploy it all together. The tutorial will use the optional Visual Studio and the Node.js Tools for Visual Studio plug-in as a development environment—I have provided links to free downloads of both tools. Level: Beginner to Intermediate–you are expected to know HTML5 and JavaScript. Part 1 – Introduction to Node.js Welcome to Part 1 of the hands-on Node.js tutorial series: Build a Node.js-powered chatroom web app. In this installment, I will explain what Node.js is, why you should pay attention to Node.js, and how to set up your machine. What is Node.js… and Why Use it? Node.js is a runtime environment and library for running JavaScript applications outside the browser. Node.js is mostly used to run real-time server applications and shines through its performance using non-blocking I/O and asynchronous […]

You may have noticed that we first talked a lot about babylon.js lately and most recently we’ve released babylon.js v2.0 with 3D sound positioning (with WebAudio) and volumetric light scattering. If you missed the v1.0 announcement, first you can catch-up with the keynote for day 2 here and go directly to 2:24-2:28: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/KEY02. In it, Microsoft evangelists Steven Guggenheimer and John Shewchuk demoed how the Oculus Rift support was added to Babylon.js. And one of the key thing for this demo was the work we did on a specific shader to simulate lenses as you can see in this picture: I also presented a session with Frank Olivier and Ben Constable about graphics on IE and Babylon.js: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/3-558 This leads me to one of the questions I often have about babylon.js: What do you mean by shaders??? So today I am going to try to explain you how shaders work. The Theory Before starting experimenting, we must first see how things work internally. When dealing with hardware accelerated 3D, we are discussing two CPUs: the main CPU and the GPU. The GPU is a kind of extremely specialized CPU. The GPU is a state machine that you set up using […]

Creating online shops based on WordPress becomes more and more popular. The reasons are the general popularity of WordPress itself and the vast range of really good plugins in this area. Today we’ll present you a German shop plugin for WordPress, which has some big advantages over other well-known solutions. wpShopGermany is, as the name indicates, made in Germany, something that can’t be said often enough if you want to operate a legally compliant shop in the EU – a market with a great number of legal constraints – and protect yourself from cease and desist letters. You don’t have to agonize over new restrictions anymore as the maennchen1 developers will take care of it and provide you with continuous updates. wpShopGermany – What You Need to Know wpShopGermany is a light WordPress plugin that extends your website by an online shop. And where’s the beef? Well, the word “premium” already indicates that it’s not for free; however, license prices are moderate and reasonable in any case. A plugin license keeps your online shop always legally compliant and gives you the freedom to take care of the really important things. The wpShopGermany plugin has been around since May 2010. It […]

The Jetpack plugin is probably one of the most feature-rich WordPress plugins on the market. It offers more than 30 functions by now, which raises the question if it really makes sense to install such a “monster”. There’s certainly one or the other useful function. But you’ll most likely find things you won’t ever need or which are already covered by other plugins. On the other hand, you could forgo all of those plugins and only use Jetpack. Let’s play this scenario through. A Jetpack with 33 Functions for WordPress Jetpack comes with 33 functions by now. But before you can benefit from the functionality of this plugin, you’ll need to connect it to your WordPress.com account. If you have a Gravatar account, you won’t need anything else. Once connected to the WordPress account, you can use all 33 Jetpack function modules. 21 are activated by default and only have to be configured – if you want to use them. The Jetpack settings menu displays the currently activated modules. Of course, you can deactivate those you don’t need and then configure the “rest”. If you hover the mouse over the modules, you’ll see the respective modules right away. Deactivate the […]

Social media marketing has become one of many buzz-words in online marketing. According to some marketing pros, it can generate orders and push sales like there’s no tomorrow. Naturally, everybody wants some piece of the action these days. But, of course, it takes more than just putting up a fancy Facebook page expecting customers are beating a path to your door on their own. Therefore, in this part of our series we will discuss some basics to make social media marketing a successful part of your marketing toolbox. Let’s first define what social media marketing actually means. Basically, social media is part of the evolution of the internet. In the beginning, it was described as a collection of information, created by some but used by many, as was the case with all kinds of media before the dawn of the internet. That has changed profoundly. Today myriads of people (everybody who likes to) create content for a vast number of other people (everybody interested). There are different kinds of social tools and channels enabling us to communicate: blogs social networks (Facebook, Google+, Xing, Twitter etc.) photo and video platforms (Youtube, Vimeo, Flickr, Instagram etc.) forums and review portals open source […]

Split-testing is an important task, but one rarely done wholeheartedly. It’s quite remarkable because as a matter of fact it’s a proven way to get you more website traffic and to convert those visitors into loyal readers, customers or whatever you may call them. Which in no way applies to e-commerce websites only. A split test is called A/B testing. For instance, you could test two headlines to find out which one performs better in directing visitors to your article. Likewise, you could put themes or theme variations against each other to see which one appeals better to your audience. Your goals remain the same: properly done split-testing should lead to more website traffic and better conversion rates. Applied Search Engine- and Customer Optimization: Split-Testing for WordPress In general, there are many things you can test against each other: homepages, headlines, descriptions, Call to Action areas, images, videos, colors, site layouts, visitor streams, etc. If you consistently check and optimize your WordPress website, there’s a good chance you’re able to increase traffic and conversions. Today, we present you some pretty interesting solutions for WordPress sites – free ones as well as paid-for offers. 1. Google Content Experiments Part of Google Analytics […]

A lot of my friends are C# or C++ developers. They are used to use inheritance in their projects and when they want to learn or discover JavaScript, one of the first question they ask is: “But how can I do inheritance with JavaScript?” Actually, JavaScript uses a different approach than C# or C++ to create an object-oriented language. It is a prototype-based language. The concept of prototyping implies that behavior can be reused by cloning existing objects that serve as prototypes. Every object in JavaScript depends from a prototype which defines a set of functions and members that the object can use. There is no class. Just objects. Every object can then be used as prototype for another object. This concept is extremely flexible and we can use it to simulate some concepts from OOP like inheritance. Implementing inheritance Let’s image what we want to create with this hierarchy using JavaScript: First of all, we can create ClassA easily. Because there is no explicit classes, we can define a set of behavior (A class so…) by just creating a function like this: 1 2 3 var ClassA = function() { this.name = “class A”; } This “class” can be […]

Jobs are no longer a safe haven. While we all know these stories of 50 years with the same company our grandparents love to tell, these days time spans shorten drastically. Already today the average employee stays three to five years with the same company, with a tendency to further decline. Besides that millions of people cannot get along with one job alone. In some countries, it is already common to run on up to four jobs to make a living. Any way you put it, applying for jobs is becoming a more and more frequent task. As with all periodic tasks, it’s a good thing to get some routine into it. Not only to make the process faster but also more professional. The least thing you want to send is an unprofessional job application that makes a perfect landing in the secretary’s dustbin. Hloom has come to your rescue with their offering of 279 professional resume templates. Hloom: Free Templates for Just About Every Need Hloom is not specialized in resume templates alone. Instead, they drive a full-fledged templates service covering all kinds of things. There are potty training charts even. Yes, you heard that right. As a potty […]

If you want your website to be successful – and even more so if you want it to earn real revenue – you need to understand your visitors’ behavior the best you can. Only after knowing their clicking paths are you able to optimize your website. In regard to online stores, this kind of knowledge can make or break your business. So be prepared to analyze your website continuously to learn which pages generate more views and find out about the most clicked items and your visitors’ and prospective customers’ areas of interest. It’s easy to get traffic numbers and page views from Google Analytics or Piwik. But for optimizing site structure or page designs, a heatmap solution is a much more useful tool. This post presents a new online solution for creating heatmaps and more. Hotjar, the All-in-One Analytics and Feedback Solution Hotjar is an attractive solution for analyzing a website or an online store. Even with the free basic account you get a lot of useful options and meaningful data. Especially, the heat map feature is noteworthy, showing you in detail the clicking paths and interests of your site visitors. Another useful feature is „Recordings“. User interaction can […]

In art school there were always those dreaded moments of putting one’s work up in front of the class for all to spill out their bile and personal problems on some classmate they hated for their talent, or life. It was something no one liked doing, mainly because it gave a voice to anyone whose mommy and daddy agreed to pony up the tuition for their strange little darling, and that opinion was unwanted, unneeded, and unwarranted. I asked one teacher why these group critiques were important when everyone had a completely different opinion, and none were right… or wrong, to be fair. He smiled and said, “Who cares what these little shites think? It’s all about you learning to listen to idiots and defend what you’ve created!” He had said that loud enough for the entire class to hear and there were actually some students who broke down in tears. Later the teacher pulled me aside and asked why I never responded to any of the critiques of my work. I told him I listened to hear if there were any good ideas and ignored the bad ones. I went over the roster of classmates and labelled each student […]