Posts about web applications

At Bocoup, we love working on the latest problems in front-end development such as parallel processing, best practices in web application development, and media-rich experiences. This is why we consider the folks at HookFlash kindred spirits; they have made browser-based peer-to-peer communication their “thing”. We recently had the privilege of working with the HookFlash team, […]

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Open Peer and the Frontiers of WebRTC

• Tagged in:
• open source,
• web standards

The 5-dimensional Web Today’s web has at least five dimensions: Width Height Time – Site content is constantly changing and being added. Hardware – Content needs to be usable on a variety of devices. Software – Different users have different browser capabilities and settings. Good websites embrace this complexity as a competitive advantage. Bad websites […]

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The Dimensions of Web Design

• Tagged in:
• design,
• mobile,
• responsive,
• software development process

Paul Irish recently gave a talk at Bocoup with a dire warning: “The Mobile Web is in Trouble.” The general theme of the talk, somewhat apparent from the title, revolved around developers moving to native apps for performance, capabilities and discoverability. Near the end of the talk he offered a challenge–developers working on the Open […]

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Random Number Generation in JavaScript

• Tagged in:
• data visualization,
• performance,
• tools and workflow

Computationally Tracking Gender Balance in News Content with Open Web Technologies Last fall, the Knight Foundation granted us from the Prototype Fund to build OpenGenderTracker, a suite of open source tools for analyzing and visualizing gender representation in journalism through the examination of pronouns in bylines and news content. Bocoupers Irene Ros and Adam Hyland […]

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Announcing OpenGenderTracker

• Tagged in:
• data analysis,
• data visualization

Learn CSS Layout is a new learning and reference site I made in my open source time here at Bocoup. Although there are lots of resources on the web for learning CSS layout techniques, we’ve had trouble finding ones we’re comfortable recommending. Learnlayout.com is an enlightening and accessible look at modern techniques for beginners, while […]

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Learn CSS Layout

• Tagged in:
• design,
• mobile,
• responsive,
• tools and workflow,
• tutorial

This post talks about the development of RapBot, my freestyle 80s battle rap generator. You might want to see it in action before reading on, and you can check out the source code here. For the past year I’ve been using the Wordnik API in my projects to generate random words. I’ve made extensive use […]

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Making a RapBot with JavaScript

• Tagged in:
• tools and workflow

Introducing Grunt v0.4 For the last nine months, I’ve been working with Ben and our team of fantastic contributors to modularize the Grunt codebase. Today, we’re happy to announce that Grunt v0.4 has been published to npm. Hold on to your hats, a lot has changed! Architectural Improvements The primary focus of this version can […]

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Tearing Grunt Apart

• Tagged in:
• open source,
• performance,
• tools and workflow

I may as well come out and say it. In 2010, I leapt directly from Dreamweaver to vim as my primary editor. (I’ve been told that I may be the only person ever to have made this jump, but have no concrete evidence to substantiate this claim.) I had grown tired of Dreamweaver’s engorged appetite […]

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Sessions: The vim Feature You Probably Aren’t Using

• Tagged in:
• tools and workflow

This post is the third in a three-part series describing our investigations into scalability for a second screen application we built for PBS. You can read the series introduction here. Being familiar with the stress testing procedure is all well-and-good, but that knowledge won’t really help you unless you have a server to test. In […]

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Realtime Node.js App: Building a Server

• Tagged in:
• performance,
• server side,
• tools and workflow,
• web applications

This post is the second in a three-part series describing our investigations into scalability for a second screen application we built for PBS. You can read the introduction here. This guide assumes you have a production server up and running. If you need help getting there, check out the final post in the series for […]

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Realtime Node.js App: Stress Testing Procedure

• Tagged in:
• deployment,
• performance,
• server side,
• testing,
• web applications