Create Custom Shortcodes To Embed Content In Hugo Posts And Pages

I’ve mentioned this numerous times before, but The Polyglot Developer is powered by Hugo which is a static site generator that takes Markdown and converts it to HTML. While Markdown is easy to use and can accomplish quite a bit, the syntax doesn’t accomplish everything that you’d hope to accomplish when it comes to a website. For example audio and video aren’t a thing in Markdown while it is in HTML. So how do you add custom components to a Hugo article?

In Hugo, you can create what is called a shortcode, which is a custom tag that gets processed differently than standard Markdown syntax. We’re going to see how to create shortcodes to take Hugo posts and pages to the next level.

Implementing U2F Authentication With Hardware Keys Using Node.js and Vue.js

Not too long ago I had written a tutorial titled, U2F Authentication with a YubiKey Using Node.js and jQuery, which demonstrated how to use hardware keys as a means of universal two-factor (U2F) authentication. However, I had left some things to be desired in that previous post. For example, the previous tutorial did not use proper session management with Express.js and it used jQuery, which is neat, but by no means is as popular as some of the other web frameworks that currently exist.

In this tutorial, we’re going to expand upon what we had done previously, but implement proper session management with Express.js and use Vue.js, which is a modern web framework.

Writing Self Hosted Alexa Skills With Golang

A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to win an Echo Dot in a company hackathon. Since then I have been trying to develop Alexa Skills that interest me in my spare time. Before exploring this new field of development, I had been interested in learning and practicing a language that was new to me, Golang (or just Go). Considering Alexa skills are based on web services, one of the area where Go excels, it seemed like a great way to “have my cake and eat it too.”

It was a couple of months ago when I came across a great post by Nic Raboy on writing about writing Alexa Skills with Golang and AWS Lambda which can be found here. Most of the Skills I have developed started before Lambda had first-class support for Go so I am much more comfortable writing Skills using self-hosted web services. Using Lambda for Alexa Skills is definitely a great approach but there are some instances where using your own server might make more sense. If you are looking to reuse an existing server or rapidly prototype an idea then maybe it makes more sense to use this approach.

In this post, I will detail the steps necessary to deploy a web service that can be used to fulfill Alexa Skill requests. To make it easier to compare this approach with using Lambda, the functionality of the Skill will remain almost identical to Nic Raboy’s example. It is only the deployment process that will be changed.

Manage Sessions Over HTTPS With Node.js And Vue.js

A long time ago when I had been exploring session management in Node.js, I had written a tutorial titled, Session Management in Your Express.js Web Application. This was a basic tutorial that is still very functional today, however little things have changed since then when it comes to how the web works. For example, in 2015 HTTPS was never a requirement and we weren’t exposed to all the frontend web frameworks that exist today.

When you start introducing things into your web applications such as HTTPS or micro-services that operate on different origins or ports, or frontend frameworks, session management can get a little more complicated. We’re going to see how to maintain a session for a user using Node.js with Express.js on our backend and Vue.js on our frontend, in this tutorial.

U2F Authentication With A YubiKey Using Node.js And jQuery

About a week ago I had written about using HTTPS with Node.js and hinted at hardware based two-factor authentication as my reason for needing it. In case you’re unfamiliar with 2FA, there are numerous approaches ranging from HMAC-based one-time passwords (HOTP) and time-based one-time passwords (TOTP) which are software based, to the hardware based universal two-factor (U2F) standard.

If you’ve been keeping up with the blog, you’ll remember I had written a tutorial titled, Implement 2FA with Time-Based One-Time Passwords in a Node.js API, which focused on the software side of things. I recently picked up some YubiKey dongles and thought I’d try my luck with the hardware side of things.

In this tutorial, we’re going to see how to implement U2F functionality in our Node.js powered RESTful API and interact with the API and our hardware dongles using jQuery in the web browser.

Create A Self-Signed Certificate For Node.js On MacOS

I recently picked up a Yubico U2F hardware key and thought I’d try to create a web application that was protected with two-factor hardware-based authentication. Things were going smooth until I realized that it is mandatory to be using HTTPS within your application, even when testing locally. HTTPS is common, but I’d never actually set it up with Node.js because I had always been using services like Cloudflare that configure it for you. The problem is that these services are for live domain names, not necessarily localhost.

While we’re not going to explore U2F hardware keys in this tutorial, we’re going to take a look at creating and installing a self-signed certificate for use in Node.js within macOS.

How To Build Reusable Angular Components And Share Them With The World

As you probably know, Angular is all about building UI components. There are several excellent component libraries out there that you can use to build your own application, such as Angular Material, Clarity or Kendo UI to name a few.

Such libraries provide common reusable components such as tabs, date pickers, collapsible menus, and much more. Still, there’s always a time where we need something more customized and more adapted to the specific needs of our project.

If you ever get in that spot where you want to create a component that might be reused in different projects, or if you want to write components that you would then open-source, this article is for you.