How to Build Your First Telegram Chatbot with Node.js
So, this morning you woke up with the idea to develop a way to store and label interesting articles you've read. After playing with the idea, you figure a Telegram chatbot is the most convenient solution for this problem.
In this guide, we'll walk you through everything you need to know to build your first Telegram chatbot using JavaScript and Node.js.
To get started, we have to register our new bot with the so-called Botfather to receive our API access token.
Bot Registration with @BotFather
The first step towards our very own Telegram bot is registering the bot with the BotFather. The BotFather is a bot itself that makes your life much easier. It helps you with registering bots, changing the bot description, adding commands, and providing you with the API token for your bot.
The API token is the most important step, as this allows you to run the code that can perform tasks for the bot.
1. Finding the BotFather
The BotFather can be found on Telegram by searching for �..
How to Build Unique, Beautiful Websites with Tailwind CSS
When thinking about what CSS framework to use for a new project, options like Bootstrap and Foundation readily jump to mind. They’re tempting to use because of their ready-to-use, pre-designed components, which developers can use with ease right away. This approach works well with relatively simple websites with a common look and feel. But as soon as we start building more complex, unique sites with specific needs, a couple of problems arise.
At some point, we need to customize certain components, create new components, and make sure the final codebase is unified and easy to maintain after the changes.
It's hard to satisfy the above needs with frameworks like Bootstrap and Foundation, which give us a bunch of opinionated and, in many cases, unwanted styles. As a result, we have to continuously solve specificity issues while trying to override the default styles. It doesn't sound like a fun job, does it?
Ready-to-use solutions are easy to implement, but inflexible and confi..
How to Automatically Optimize Responsive Images in Gatsby
Image optimization — at least in my experience — has always been a major pain when building speedy websites. Balancing image quality and bandwidth efficiency is a tough act without the right tools. Photo editing tools such as Photoshop are great for retouching, cropping and resizing bitmap images. Unfortunately, they are not that good at creating 100% optimized images for the web.
Luckily, we have extension packages for build tools that can optimize images for us quickly:
Gulp: gulp-imagemin
Grunt: grunt-imagemin
Webpack: imagemin-webpack
Parcel: parcel-plugin-imagemin
Unfortunately, image optimization alone is not enough. You need to make sure that the entire website is responsive and looks great at all screen sizes. This can easily be done through CSS, but here lies the problem:
Should you optimize your image for large screens or small screens?
If the majority of your audience is using mobile devices to access your site, then the logical choice is to optimize images for small scr..
Create an Offline-first React Native App Using WatermelonDB
React Native has different database storage mechanisms for different mobile app purposes. Simple structures — such as user settings, app settings, and other key-value pair data — can be handled easily using async storage or secure storage.
Other applications — such as Twitter clones — fetch data from the server and directly show it to the user. They maintain a cache of data, and if a user needs to interact with any document, they call the APIs directly.
So not all the applications require a database.
When We Need a Database
Applications such as the Nozbe (a to-do app), Expense (a tracker), and SplitWise (for in-app purchases), need to work offline. And to do so, they need a way to store data locally and sync it up with the server. This type of application is called an offline first app. Over time, these apps collect a lot of data, and it becomes harder to manage that data directly — so a database is needed to manage it efficiently.
Options in React Native
When developing an app, ch..
SitePoint Premium New Releases: Design Systems, SVG & React Native
We're working hard to keep you on the cutting edge of your field with SitePoint Premium. We've got plenty of new books to check out in the library — let us introduce you to them.
Design Systems and Living Styleguides
Create structured, efficient and consistent designs with design systems and styleguides. Explore materials, typography, vertical rhythm, color, icons and more.
➤ Read Design Systems and Living Styleguides.
Build a Real-time Location Tracking App with React Native and PubNub
In this guide, we’re going to use React Native to create real-time location tracking apps. We’ll build two React Native apps — a tracking app and one that’s tracked.
➤ Read Build a Real-time Location Tracking App with React Native and PubNub.
Practical SVG
From software basics to build tools to optimization, you’ll learn techniques for a solid workflow.
Go deeper: create icon systems, explore sizing and animation, and understand when and how to implement fallbacks. Get your images up t..
Build a Real-time Voting App with Pusher, Node and Bootstrap
In this article, I'll walk you through building a full-stack, real-time Harry Potter house voting web application.
Real-time apps usually use WebSockets, a relatively new type of transfer protocol, as opposed to HTTP, which is a single-way communication that happens only when the user requests it. WebSockets allow for persistent communication between the server and the user, and all those users connected with the application, as long as the connection is kept open.
A real-time web application is one where information is transmitted (almost) instantaneously between users and the server (and, by extension, between users and other users). This is in contrast with traditional web apps where the client has to ask for information from the server. — Quora
Our Harry Potter voting web app will show options (all the four houses) and a chart on the right side that updates itself when a connected user votes.
To give you a brief idea of look and feel, the final application is going to look..
State Management in React Native
Managing state is one of the most difficult concepts to grasp while learning React Native, as there are so many ways to do it. There are countless state management libraries on the npm registry — such as Redux — and there are endless libraries built on top of other state management libraries to simplify the original library itself — like Redux Easy. Every week, a new state management library is introduced in React, but the base concepts of maintaining the application state has remained the same since the introduction of React.
The most common way to set state in React Native is by using React’s setState() method. We also have the Context API to avoid prop drilling and pass the state down many levels without passing it to individual children in the tree.
Recently, Hooks have emerged into React at v16.8.0, which is a new pattern to simplify use of state in React. React Native got it in v0.59.
In this tutorial, we’ll learn about what state actually is, and about the setState() method, ..
How to Redesign Unsplash Using Styled Components
Writing future-proof CSS is hard. Conflicting classnames, specificity issues, and so on, come up when you have to write and maintain thousands of lines of CSS. To get rid of the aforementioned issues, Styled Components was created.
Styled Components makes it easy to write your CSS in JS and makes sure there are no conflicting classnames or specificity issues with multiple other benefits. This makes writing CSS a joy.
In this tutorial, we’ll explore what CSS in JS is, the pros and cons of styled-components, and finally, we’ll redesign Unsplash using Styled Components. After completing this tutorial, you should be able to quickly get up and running with Styled Components.
Note: Styled Components was specifically built with React in mind, so you have to be using React to use Styled Components.
Prerequisites
For this tutorial, you need a basic knowledge of React.
Throughout the course of this tutorial we’ll be using yarn. If you don’t have yarn already installed, then install it from ..
4 Key Principles to Remember When Building B2B Ecommerce Websites
This article was created in partnership with StudioWorks. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.
B2B ecommerce businesses are currently facing a bit of a boom. Forrester estimates that B2B ecommerce revenues will reach $1.8 trillion in the US in the next four years. And a recent BigCommerce study found that 41% of B2B retailers predict their online sales to increase more than 25% by the end of the year.
So if you’re building a B2B ecommerce storefront to capitalize on this boom, it’s important that you take the time to ensure that the website has all the right functionality to receive and fulfill orders, and to deliver a great shopping experience to your buyers.
In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the key principles you’ll need to keep in mind when tackling a B2B ecommerce website build.
But before we begin, let’s put everything into a bit of context.
Key Differences Between B2C and B2B Ecommerce Sites
B2B ecommerce companies, of course, provide ..
25+ JavaScript Shorthand Coding Techniques
This really is a must read for any JavaScript developer. I have written this guide to shorthand JavaScript coding techniques that I have picked up over the years. To help you understand what is going on, I have included the longhand versions to give some coding perspective.
August 26th, 2019: This article was updated to add new shorthand tips based on the latest specifications. If you want to learn more about ES6 and beyond, sign up for SitePoint Premium and check out our extensive library of modern JavaScript resources.
1. The Ternary Operator
This is a great code saver when you want to write an if..else statement in just one line.
Longhand:
const x = 20;
let answer;
if (x > 10) {
answer = “greater than 10”;
} else {
answer = “less than 10”;
}
Shorthand:
const answer = x > 10 ? “greater than 10” : “less than 10”;
You can also nest your if statement like this:
const answer = x > 10 ? “greater than 10” : x < 5 ? "less than 5" : "between 5 and 10";
2. Short-circuit Evaluation..