Starting over with a new tut http://pixelhandler.com/posts/develop-a-restful-api-using-nodejs-with-express-and-mongoose this more similarly emulates the stack I want to end up using
Following t this tutorial http://pixelhandler.com/posts/develop-a-restful-api-using-nodejs-with-express-and-mongoose had to change createServer because of deprecation and also no more bodyParser() http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19581146/how-to-get-rid-of-connect-3-0-deprecation-alert
new tutorial http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19581146/how-to-get-rid-of-connect-3-0-deprecation-alert