I am Joshua Johanan and this is a blog about writing code

This will be just a quick post. Sometimes you have to prove your ownership of a domain. This is true when you sign up for Google Web Master Tools or want to run a test with Blitz.io. Google and Blitz.io give you a long hexadecimal string that you have to respond to from your site. In the case of Blitz.io they give you a string that needs to respond with ’42’.

I recently moved this website to run in the cloud. It was previously running on an old computer in my basement. I have had plans to play with EC2 machines. I also needed to update my Ubuntu install since it was 10.04. One more mark for moving the server to the cloud column was that I switched ISPs. AT&T was my ISP for the last 3 years, but Comcast had wooed me in with a deal.

I have fallen behind writing posts through Christmas and the new year. I plan on making more posts and github repos. I can tell by the traffic and starring/forking of my repos that these posts at least help a few people out there. Now that I have stated my excuses, a saying I have heard is that excuses only make you feel better, is to lay out a road map of my next few posts.

Just a quick note on the commenting side of the blog is that I am switching over to Disqus. The previous system used Facebook and although it did work I did not like it all that much. I really haven’t had to much commenting so far, but if you have commented I have not migrated it over.

I want to give a quick thanks to Theshibboleth who created the SVG of the US. I downloaded it from Wikipedia. The SVG SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics. The simplest definition is that it is an XML file that describes how to build an image. If you would like to know more as always you can use Wikipedia or do a quick Google search. SVG has support in HTML5 for inline and loading.

In the previous post I discussed the server side. This post will cover client side. The server side has a lot less code because it only worries about taking the requests and putting them into redis and then sending them back out. The client has the all the display logic. Let’s get started. Socket.io The great thing about socket.io is that the client side is just as easy as the server side.

This is a simple application that I have used to try my hand at node.js, socket.io, and redis. The idea came from a co-worker who asked me if I could build an application to collect the votes of our other co-workers to determine where to eat. An initial inspiration came from geoloqi through a game they created. It introduced me to using node.js, socket.io, and redis together to keep multiple browsers in sync.