The Missing Markdown Editor

Let me start by introducing my favorite way to write notes, documents, or any other type of text for that matter. It’s a format called Markdown created by John Gruber. Take a look at his project page for Markdown to learn more about it. I’ve recently discovered a great little application for OS X that absolutely blew me away with how simple, yet amazingly feature packed it is. This application is Mou written by Chen Luo. The missing Markdown editor for web developers.

5 For Friday – Links, Stories, & Posts For Your Weekend

It’s that time of the week again — this week’s 5 for Friday is by Caleb Albritton, one of our development team members, so step right up for a mix of tech tips and SEO news you can use!

Cross Compiling Node.js v0.8.x — N8.io

In this blog post by Nathan Rajlich, we’re given some examples for how to compile the Node.js engine for the ARM architecture. This would be a beneficial read to anyone wanting to run Node.js on their new Raspberry Pi or Android device.

Ten Bets You Will Never Lose — LifeHacker

Hammer Time! Squishing Fonts Into Text With Base64

Ah, fonts. This binary data increases page load time, file size, the number of HTTP requests. Fonts will also cause the page to jump from a basic font to the included one when the font takes longer to load than it does to display the markup. All these hindrances, coupled with having many images, will begin to deteriorate your page’s load times. However, there’s a way to transfer your page’s custom fonts as plain text to the browser and compile them into a single request. Merging the request for multiple files into one or two requests will decrease your page’s load time and efficiency. Naturally the next question is, “How can I do this?” It’s actually very simple. There is a method for converting binary data into plain text using Base64 conversion. To quote Wikipedia in how Base64 conversion works, you can use the word “Man” as an example: