In the time since my first post on accessing non-virtual DOM nodes with Mercury / virtual-dom, I’ve learnt that my approach wasn’t as sound as I initially thought. The creator of Mercury, Jake Verbaten, let me know that virtual-dom hooks should only modify node attributes, otherwise the behaviour will be undefined ("innerHTML in hooks breaks the tree indexing that virtual-dom is using"). Instead, I learnt, one should use Mercury Widgets to render directly to the DOM.

I am facing the need to upload pictures to Amazon S3 in my Meteor application, MuzHack. The pictures must be resized before storing in S3, and there’s the option of doing this either on my server or in the client. I have elected to go with the latter for now, since it’s simple and doesn’t put load on my server. To resize pictures client side I am using the Meteor Clientside Image Manipulation library, and to upload pictures to S3 I am using Slingshot.

At work, we are using the Mercury JavaScript UI library, which is a more functional alternative to React (at least this is my understanding of it). It is also highly modular, in that it’s simply composed from several independent libraries (such as virtual-dom). Like React, Mercury hides the browser DOM behind a virtual model, to improve performance. However, this can cause problems in case you need real access to the DOM.

I have recently implemented continuous deployment of my MuzHack Web application to the Docker hosting service Tutum, in both production and staging versions. I am really pleased with the smoothness of the whole process of setting it up, and the ease of day-to-day administration. Docker Image Definition The very first thing I had to do was to define MuzHack’s Docker image. This is done in the so-called Dockerfile. I base it off the standard Node image.

Today I wrote a Python script in order to insert data into Meteor’s MongoDB instance, and the first question that came up was how to get hold of the connection parameters. It turns out that Meteor has a command for this purpose: meteor mongo -U [site] If you leave out the 'site' argument, you’ll get the URL to connect to the local MongoDB instance for the current Meteor app (relative to the directory you’re in).

In my Meteor-based project MusitechHub, I recently had to figure out how to set page title dynamically for certain pages. I’m using Iron Router to implement routing in the application, which laid the premise for the solution. I gathered from the #meteor channel on IRC that I could base my solution on Manuel Schoebel’s SEO package, which is able to set the current page title. Since I wasn’t able to figure out myself how to apply it, I continued by asking on Stack Overflow.

Last Thursday (the 5th of February) I gave a talk on my project ChucKJS at the Berlin NodeJS meetup. It turned out to be a very positive experience, which is especially great since it was the first time I’ve given a talk at a meetup or indeed outside of internal company gatherings. Based on the number of questions I received, there appeared to be a great deal of interest in Web Audio and Emscripten in the development community.

Chromium/Google Chrome is my hands-down favourite browser for developing Web sites in, owing to its incredibly sleek developer tools. I feel right at home in its JavaScript console, for evaluating JavaScript interactively or to inspect logs from a running JavaScript application. However, the latter scenario is somewhat let down by the console’s limited search functionality. At the time of writing, the console only lets you search for plain text on a line-by-line basis.