Building the Realtime User Experience: Creating Immersive and Interactive Websites

The Web is increasingly happening in realtime. With websites such as Facebook and Twitter leading the way, users are coming to expect that all sites should serve content as it occurs –– on smartphones as well as computers. This book shows you how to build realtime user experiences by adding chat, streaming content, and including more features on your site one piece at a time, without making big changes to the existing infrastructure. You‘ll also learn how to serve realtime content beyond the browser.

Throughout the book are many practical JavaScript and Python examples that you can use on your site now. And in the final chapter, you‘ll build a location–aware game that combines all of the technologies discussed.

• Use the latest realtime syndication technology, including PubSubHubbub
• Build dynamic widgets on your homepage to show realtime updates from several sources
• Learn how to use long polling to "push" content from your server to browsers
• Create an application using the Tornado web server that makes sense of massive amounts of streaming content
• Understand the unique requirements for setting up a basic chat service
• Use IM and SMS to enable users to interact with your site outside of a web browser
• Implement custom analytics to measure engagement in realtime

Ted Roden was the first full–time developer hired on at Vimeo.com, and currently works in the Research and Development group at The New York Times. His work researching and prototyping topics closely related to the content of this book has been profiled by Harvard University‘s Nieman Journalism Lab (http://bit.ly/f7rdJ http://bit.ly/YzELI). At the Times, he has also worked on bringing election night coverage, maps, and updates to the mobile website, as well as March Madness fantasy brackets. He is also the creator of a popular social bookmarking site: enjoysthin.gs.