Node.js in Production

Curiosity Media runs the world’s largest Spanish learning website, SpanishDict.com, backed by many different Node.js applications. Since rolling out our first Node.js applications over a year ago, we have collected a fair amount of good and bad operational experiences.

I created a talk about our journey with Node.js for the Seattle Node.js Meetup group’s May 8th, 2013 event. My slides are available at the following locations:

• GitHub Site: A live, navigable reveal.js website. (Note: use the space bar to advance slides and arrow keys to navigate.)
• SlideShare: More traditional format, with download (PDF) links.

And, here’s an embedded format:

Bringing Bootswatch to Sphinx

The Bootstrap Theme for Sphinx documentation continues to evolve, and I’m pleased to announce the v0.2.0 release. The theme integrates Twitter’s Bootstrap library into Sphinx, and v0.2.0 adds new support for Bootswatch CSS extensions, which provide a lot of great new UI possibilities for your documentation. We’ve also internally updated to Bootstrap 2.3.1.

The project’s demonstration site now uses the “united” Bootswatch theme to give a clean and well… orange-ish feel to the site. Here is a screenshot of the demonstration site in a desktop viewport:

[![Theme with Bootswatch][img_demo_desk_th]][img_demo_desk] [img_demo_desk_th]: http://loose-bits.com/media/img/2013/04/10/demo_desk_th.png [img_demo_desk]: http://loose-bits.com/media/img/2013/04/10/demo_desk.png

The project is available for download from GitHub and PyPi. You are encouraged to update and try out some Bootswatch goodness!

Sphinx Bootstrap Theme

The Sphinx Bootstrap Theme is an extension for the Sphinx documentation tool, used for Python-based API documentation and static website authoring. The theme integrates Twitter Bootstrap, which is a wildly popular frontend framework. The theme GitHub project provides a demonstration site using the theme.

The theme project continues to move along, and as it has been a while since my last update post, here are some of the changes in version 0.1.6 (since 0.1.0):

• Update to Bootstrap v2.3.0.
• Enable configuration of the depth of the Global TOC (“Site” tab).
• Add footer divider and various other styling tweaks.
• Add Bootstrap styling for tables and inline code snippets

In addition, much of the underlying rendering JavaScript code has been revised. For example, Twitter Bootstrap v2.3.0 handles behavior like dropdown menu clicks in mobile much better than previous versions, enabling removal of some hacks and patches in the theme.