Awhile back, we wanted to create demo videos for clients, showcasing some of our iPad Web Application work. One of the challenges was how to show the interactions — the touches and gestures — when working with the application. There is no mouse, like on desktops. A screenshot, or a video of the application, will simply show things happening as if by magic. And taking a video or photo of a user interacting with the device is just clumsy and laborious: You need a camera, the user’s hand covers the content, you have to get a manicure, all that.

With the programming expertise of Xiyuan Shen and our good friend Ian Gilman, I set out to do something about this. I knew from having seen the awesome yet thoroughly creepy Phantom Limb that it was possible to inject a mouse-marker using a bookmarklet. This would allow us to run our code on almost any webpage, without the author having to include our script on their page. It could be injected on an as-needed basis by the presenter.

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Most cloud services require you to create a CNAME record for your custom domain in order to direct traffic to the cloud-hosted site. Your example.com site may actually be hosted at example.cloudapp.net. For on-premises hosting you would know the IP address of your server (or the load balancer) and can use an A record, but that is not the case on Azure or AWS: these require that pesky CNAME.

CNAME records don’t support naked domains. Your site has to be at www.example.com, it can’t be at simply example.com, the root, or apex, record of your domain. On the other hand, A records can only support IP addresses.

There are a number of solutions to this problem, so I’ll list some here:

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