can't connect to socket io in production - angularjs

Question

I can't connect to socket.io in production. It works fine in my dev server, but I'm not getting the "websocket user connected" message in the console in production and my heat map isn't populating with the test data. I'm getting net:: ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT in the browser jscript console.
from the server:
io.origins('http://example.com/path:8080')
app.get('/somepath', function (req, res, next) {
// code here
io.emit('update', data)
console.log('update has been emitted') // this prints and I see the data object in the console
res.end("OK")
})
io.on('connection', function (socket) {
console.log('websocket user connected')
});
from the angular controller:
$http.get('http://example.com/somepath?'+str) // hits somepath with test data in query string 'str'
from the script in /path:
var socket = io('http://example.com:8080');
and I've also included the cdn for socket.io in the page /path
<script src="https://cdn.socket.io/socket.io-1.3.2.js"></script>

Answer 1

The problem was that I had to include to port number in the URL for the development server, but it will not make the connection if I use the port in my production server. I'm not sure exactly why this is, but I suppose that the port is implied in a request from my browser and maybe something about the format makes it unrecognizable if explicitly stated.
Changes I made:
I removed the io.origins statement from the server because the default for socket.io is to allow any origin. That removes one possible source of error.
I removed the port number from $http.get() in the angular controller and changed var socket = io('http://example.com:8080') to var socket = io('http://example.com') in another script