Errata

No matter what I do, I cannot get the Twitter example to work with ejs.

First I tried it as written, got:

Error: failed to locate view "index"

Then I tried installing ejs and adding app.set('view engine', 'ejs'); per the previous erratum and got the same error.

Then I read through the Express docs, which are equally obtuse, and got nowhere.

It would help if you mentioned to call the layout file "layout.ejs", and where to put the layout.ejs file, and what extension to give the index file, and where to put it, and whether or not ejs needs to be installed. As it stands, this example is very frustrating because it doesn't work as written.

clientList[i].writeable is undefined.

I know this is a property of the Stream super class but it seems net.Socket does not know about this property.

When the code is run as listed in the book with say 3 clients, all clients that not satisfying the

clientList[i]!==client

are added to cleanup[], as clientList[i].writeable is undefined. Adding a

console.log(clientList[i].writeable)

Before the check against writeable will show this. Adding the code from Example 2-12 will confirm this, logging the following to console:

[TypeError: Cannot read property 'writeable' of undefined]

I'm using v0.8..15 so that might be the issue?

In ejs 1.0.0, function partial has been removed. Instead, use code like below:
<% tweets.forEach(function(tweet){ %>
<% include partials/chirp %>
<% }) %>

Inheritance is note working, should use include:
<% include header %>
you original body code
<% include footer %>

Need tell express to use ejs explicitly:
app.set('view engine', 'ejs')
Or
res.render('index.ejs', function(rep, res){...})

Following the code in book, style.css is not accessable. Need add:
app.use('/public', express.static(__dirname + '/public'));
I'm not sure this is the right way, but it works.

For the Chirpie example, I was unable to get the local variables to work, most likely due to the many different Node.js and Express changes.

Finally I found that you simply just need to remove the 'locals' part. So change the following example from this:

res.render('index', {
locals: {
'title': title,
'header': header,
'tweets': tweets,
stylesheets: ['/public/style.css']
}
})

To this:
res.render('index', {
'title': title,
'header': header,
'tweets': tweets,
stylesheets: ['/public/style.css']
})

I ended up having to also change other things about this example but as far as the local variables, this worked for me. Thank you for the book!

"The block sizes vary between algorithms:
blowfish, for example, uses 40-byte blocks."

Actually, it's 64-bit (8-byte), not 40-byte.

The Let's Build Twitter is severely lacking in information. Moreover with updates to Express and EJS there are some lines of code that just don't work.

I'm not trying to plug my own blog (its not really a blog more a place where I brain dump my own findings/projects) but if you want a solution please see: http://www.samk3nny.com/?p=120.

There may be improvements to this and in time, my fixes may become redundant. But as of 11th January 2014, with much gnashing of teeth, I got the Twitter, aka Chirpie, app to work.

Enjoy.

Sam

the EJS example states "The tweets are also coming out in chronological order...We'll fix that too"

but that never happens, there's no text whatsoever on addressing this.