The MEAN Stack Newsletter Issue 6: Rad CyberTech, HuskerJS.dev, FactorJS, Geaux.codes and More!
I'm back to getting this out on Thursdays - forever! Lots of fun this week and big announcements!
Introducing my publication for Web Devs and Tech Junkies, Rad CyberTech
I have wanted to start my own publication (outside of this newsletter of course) that is like a magazine. As I’ve learned to code over the years and always found myself fascinated with new technologies and new frameworks, I started to figure out that I wanted to create my very own technology publication - the raddest tech publication as a matter of fact.
Meet Rad CyberTech Magazine, the online web dev and tech junkie community and online publication that showcases cool websites, new tools and frameworks, tutorials and much more. I plan on publishing daily articles on the website, a weekly newsletter (much like this one), and then a monthly magazine that requires a subscription, but also included with the subscription to the monthly publication is a ‘zine’ that will go to your address! I can’t wait to get to designing my first ‘zine that I think everyone will thoroughly enjoy.
I’ll be bringing readers the next biggest frameworks since React; tech new from the far corners of the universe, I mean the Meta-Verse; most importantly, you will get exclusive tutorials created by yours truly that will make you a better developer or dumber somehow while teaching you a new skill. Head over to www.radcybertech.com and subscribe today! Use RADNESS for 20% off the paid subscription which will get you access to the very first ‘zine!
Plugging my own new tech things today!
HuskerJS.dev - Online college sports blogging platform, data visualization, and other digital experience based things for fans, players, and institutions!
Have you ever wanted to have full control over your very own website to follow your local state school’s sports programs? You know, control all of the content, create awesome little digital replays of last night’s games, or host your own forum of hooligans talking trash about their state rivals?
Look no further than my new college sports digital experience platform, HuskerJS.dev! While it is still in the very early Beta stages of development, I want to show you the possibilities that you can imagine with customized web development experiences for your favorite team or alma mater. While there is more to come soon, you can request teams, features, or check out my other templates I have started. All of that will be on the website very soon!
FactorJS - Another Jamstack Static Site Generator that is a great modular JavaScript Framework.
Just like JavaScript Frameworks, static site generators never get old to me. I may be alone in that category and you may think I’m a huge nerd, but go ahead and laugh away because I’ll make a thousand more websites than you ever will in your life cool person. I especially love new static site generators like FactorJS that bring something new to the table instead of just trying to be like a copy of Eleventy or Gatsby.
FactorJS uses a 12 Factor App methodology which is a strategy to achieve maximum portability in applications. This strategy and FactorJS allows you to scale apps cheaply, extend your apps, avoid proprietary APIs and services, keeps your apps simple, and follows some great software practices that will help you become a better developer in the process. I am keeping this one on my radar and watching it closely as it moves into production as I think it could be a game changer in the JavaScript world.
Acreom - “The way developers get things done”.
There’s another hot new notes/task tracking app taking the market by storm, and this time it's a real winner. Acreom has a sleek user interface that combines your notes and tasks into a whole application, alongside your Google calendar so you stay completely connected to your day while also isolating enough to keep your notes in a their own environment. I fell in love with it right away which is great considering I love LogSeq and sometimes. use that over more convenient choices.
You can create your own templates (like most of these apps do) but something about Acreom just feels more like you have control over your whole interface. The Gmail calendar integration truly does make it very handy for a public notes app to collaborate with a dev team. Maybe I’ll use this for public and LogSeq for private… Who knows? Looks like reviewing note/knowledge apps is a great first task for Rad CyberTech Magazine!
Draftbox - It’s better than WordPress, easier than developing your own blog.
When I started coding and creating things from scratch, I never thought I’d use something low or no-code like Draftbox. Draftbox is surprisingly full of features and has opened my eyes to an awesome content publishing platform that I think both developers and non-developers will enjoy. It has all the plugins that you would want from WordPress is your a smart developer and integrates with Netlify (I’m a partner so this makes me really happy).
Probably the greatest features of this CMS is that you get an automatic 2x Lighthouse score and boosted SEO, right out of the box. It produces a nice looking site that looks professionally developed as well. I’ll have to get into much more depth in my video review of this because there is so much more to talk about on Draftbox than the space I have available for this newsletter.
Kaption - Find incredible ways to optimize your website with AI-first analytics
Funny enough, Kaption was created by the same crew that is developing FactorJS. Kaption is a leader in creating AI technologies for marketing analytics to help you know your customer better. SaaS developers and anyone with a new product just perked right up when I said that. It is indeed quite an awesome platform and you can sign up for free to try it out.
You can choose different widgets to test different customer behavior based off of recorded usage sessions. Three are widgets we’re all accustomed to like HotJar’s heat map, but Kaption even goes so far as to offering a huge variety of widgets like total touches and total scrolls alongside conversion statistics and referral sources. Just create a form, design it (or choose a template), and deploy it and get your feedback that is oh-so valuable for new products. You can integrate them with Slack and Google sheets to get your data sent right to you.
What a week of self promotion - and I still got one more thing to let y’all know about:
I will be offering a paid version of the newsletter, however it won’t be in print. I will be doing a video newsletter for each version and offering it to paid subscribers. So for each product I review, I will be doing a tutorial on how to use it and reviewing it for y’all. I’ll also be adding in some tutorials and plan on doing an email course here in the near future.
I am super excited to start sharing my video content and will also be doing some live video newsletters, once I get the hang of it. Oh and that’s not all - I will be doing a podcast call the MEAN Stack Podcast each week as well. You can look out for the first episode to be released tonight.
I thank all of you who read this and have been so supportive of my efforts - this does take a great deal of my time and I have been doing it for free so it feels really good to hear that some of y’all like the MEAN Stack Newsletter. I’m going to be promoting it more to hopefully bring in some operational income to improve this publication’s quality with a solid podcast and YouTube Channel.
Speaking of the YouTube channel, you can follow me at GeauxWeisbeck4 Web Dev for now, but I am working on the MEAN Stack developer and/or Rad CyberTech. I am still trying to figure out how I want to brand YouTube so everything fits together.
I will be sending out a survey soon - any feedback is greatly appreciated. And as always, please subscribe, share and let me know what you think! I want this to be your newsletter and not mine. Let me know what’s shakin and bakin and what’s ice cold turkey.
Thank you for reading - it means the world to this MEAN Stack Dev!