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This blog has had a long and generally boring history. It started off on an old computer in my basement. This was in late 2011. I then needed to upgrade Ubuntu. This lead me to move the site into the cloud on Amazon EC2. It was a standard LAMP server running Ubuntu 12.04. That was three years ago and I needed to upgrade to the next Ubuntu LTS. To move to the new server I created an Ansible playbook to setup the server and Docker to run the site.

This has been adapted from the source to better fit my blog’s presentation and has a few typos fixed, which means that there are a few typos in the book :(. Using Socket.IO and Express together We previously created an Express application. This application is just the foundation. We are going to add features until it is a fully usable app. We currently can serve web pages and respond to HTTP, but now we want to add real-time communication.

What is React React is a new library for building user interfaces (to steal it directly from their site) developed by Facebook. React is not a full featured JavaScript application framework. This means it is not competing in the same space as Angular, Ember, Backbone or <insert your favorite framework that I am not mentioning here>. It also means it does not care how you route, where you get your data, or any application plumbing.

Bower Bower is a package manager like npm. In much the same way as npm, Bower needs Node.js and runs on top of it. While npm focuses on packages for Node.js, Bower usually targets front-end libraries like jQuery and React. Managing front-end libraries is much better than the old way of just downloading a version and sticking it in our project. We now have full version control. Bower uses a configuration file named bower.

One of my most popular posts is about using Node.js, Socket.IO, and Redis to build a small voting application. It is also my most forked repo on Github. After finishing the book I decided to revisit this codebase and see how it has held up over time. Unfortunately it needed some improvement. There is a law of programming that states any code that is more than three months old will be viewed as crap.

I have not been updating this blog like I should have been for about the last year. That is unfortunate. Although I feel I have a good reason. I have been writing a book! You can currently see the pre-order page at Packt Publishing. This book is almost 300 pages that will start the reader from an empty folder to a working, scalable application that is published to Amazon Web Services.

This is just going to be a quick post. This blog is hosted on WordPress. I am making this post as I just updated WordPress just the other day. It’s nice to be able to do it right in the admin site. To do this you will need to change the file permissions of the WordPress install. Many times in the forum any questions regarding file permissions will have some responses to set the folders to 755 or even worse 777 with the webserver user being the owner.