Data, Maps, Usability, and Performance

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Create Repositories with GitHub API and HTML5

Create repo with GitHub API

Create GitHub Repo with Folder Upload

GitHub has a ton of awesome repositories and it hosts most of the top libraries, frameworks, and plugins. People sometimes ask me to put code on GitHub and today I wanted to look into optimizing that process. It’s not hard to create a git repo, pull it, authenticate, and commit from the command line but it would be great to just have it all work with just a folder upload. If you are working on a project, it probably lives in a folder on your hard drive, so lets create a page where you can upload folders and it automatically creates a repository using the GitHub API.

First, I will pick up from my last post on the Gist API and explain how you can create and add files to GitHub repos with Ajax. Then, I will create an online page that supports repo creation with client-side folder input and API calls with Ajax.
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NodeJS on Google App Engine

Nodejs on Google App Engine

Are you looking for free hosting for your node projects? You could try DigitalOcean but GAE Managed VMs are now in Beta (you can use them without whitelisting) so I wanted to dedicate a quick post on running Node on Google App Engine. It could be a free and easy way to host your node.JS app. Since we are not coding in Java, Python, or Go Lang, we need to setup a custom runtime environment on a Virtual Machine. So, below I will go over installing Managed VMs with Google Cloud SDK and Docker to build and deploy a sample app, written in Node and Express, to Google App Engine.
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Automate SlideShare Creation with JavaScript and APIs

programmatic automation

I am a big fan of SlideShare and automation so today I want to show how you can programatically create a slideshow with JavaScript and upload it to your account with the SlideShare API. I am going to use jsPDF to generate a PDF file from images and text. When the pdf is created, I will use the upload_slideshow API call to upload the pdf into awesome slides on SlideShare. And the slides will be the actual steps to do this. Let’s start.
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