Prerender Your AngularJS Apps To Boost SEO

A Twitter subscriber of mine recently asked me if I knew how to use Prerender with my AngularJS applications to boost SEO when being crawled by search engines. My immediate answer was no, but I offered to help him figure it out and write an article on it.

Prerendering AngularJS web apps is critical for SEO because when web crawlers such as Google crawl a web page, they do not process all the AngularJS source code and curly bracket elements. With prerendering enabled, a web crawler will see the actual value found in curly brackets rather than the variables themselves.

Understanding Request Signing For Oauth 1.0a Providers

I am very familiar with Oauth 2.0, but recently I had to work with Twitter and it was not as smooth of an experience as other providers such as Google and Facebook. This is because Twitter uses Oauth 1.0a and requires request signing.

Oauth 1.0a requires requests to be signed using HMAC and a secret key. Using this protects communication between the client and the server, but how do we accomplish this task?

Using The UI-Router To Navigate In Ionic Framework

Being that Ionic Framework relies heavily on the UI-Router for navigation, I thought I would do a write-up on how to properly use it.

We use the UI-Router to navigate between view states in our application. By view states, I mean screens composed as template files. If you’re looking for information on navigating in Ionic 2, visit my other post on the subject as it doesn’t use the UI-Router like Ionic Framework 1 does.

Tracking Pageviews with Google Analytics and Angular JS

Recently I noticed in my Google analytics dashboard that Analytics wasn’t tracking the full url of the page of my Angular JS site. I was tracking individual pageviews using this code in my app.js file:

MyApp.run(function($rootScope, $location, $window){
    $rootScope.$on('$routeChangeSuccess', function() {
        $window._gaq.push(['_trackPageview', $location.path()]);
    })
})

Implement AES Strength Encryption With JavaScript

I recently started playing around with the Dropbox Datastore JavaScript API and decided that I wanted an extra layer of security in the data I store on the Dropbox server. I figured the best way to accomplish this would be to encrypt all data in my application before syncing.

It took me a while to find an encryption library that I liked, but in the end, I chose the JavaScript library Forge. This library has plenty of cryptography tools that extend beyond just AES encryption, thus making it very worthy to check out.

Generate Time-Based One-Time Passwords With JavaScript

I recently released an iOS and Android application called OTP Safe to iTunes and Google Play. OTP Safe makes use of the time-based one-time password (TOTP) algorithm commonly used with two-factor authentication (2FA). How exactly, does this algorithm work, and how can we make it work with JavaScript?

Using the following resources as our framework, we can make use of the TOTP algorithm quickly and easily:

• http://blog.tinisles.com/2011/10/google-authenticator-one-time-password-algorithm-in-javascript/
• https://code.google.com/p/google-authenticator/source/browse/libpam/totp.html?r=a852f172b62bf58d436e942e59f6439224b1477d

Syncing Data With Dropbox Using Ionic Framework

Storing or syncing data remotely is often a need in modern apps. This generation is all about the cloud and how to be a part of it. Ionic Framework is a great way to make hybrid cross platform mobile Android and iOS applications, but how about sharing data between them? Dropbox is one of a few cloud storage services that happens to have great APIs and documentation.

The following won’t necessarily show you the best way for syncing data in Ionic Framework using Dropbox’s Datastore API, but it will show you how I did it with success.