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Create a PDF from Markdown workflow with BBEdit and MultiMarkdown

I use BBEdit for more or less everything I write. When I write text documents I use Markdown to format the document. If I need to send the document to a customer I generate a nicely formatted PDF. I can’t stand ugly typography so I want my PDF documents to look at least decent.

Markdown editor for BUEditor on Drupal

The Markdown editor for BUEditor now has a stable 1.0 release for Drupal 7. I was recently made co-maintainer and are now preparing a 1.1 release. Please help by testing 7.x-1.x-dev. My goal with Markdown editor, besides making it even better, is to make it 10 to 100 times more popular.

If you want to see Markdown editor 7.x-1.x-dev in action I have posted an screencast Introduction to Markdown editor for BUEditor on Vimeo.

Bye-bye Twitter and hello App.net

I started using Twitter 3+ years ago. Mostly I have used it to stay in contact with fellow Drupal developers. It has been both fun and useful. Now I have deleted all but two tweets and will most likely post no more. I keep the account for some time for the direct messaging functionality.

The main problem with Twitter for me is that I’m not their customer, I’m there product. This is true of all services where advertising is the primary source of revenue. Add to this Twitters increasingly hostile attitude towards third party clients and recent API changes and I’m out.

HDtracks – I'm buying music again, and life is better at 24 bit

Just now I’m downloading another four albums I bought from HDtracks. It has been many years since I bought new music like I have done since I discovered HDtracks some month ago.

Once upon a time I bought a lot of music, mostly on LP and later also on CD. Then came DRM, Loudness War and lossy compression (MP3 etc.) and I almost stopped buying music.

Looking for a decent headphone for my MacBook and iPhone - found Sennheiser PX 200-IIi

For more years than I can remember I have been using Koss Porta Pro headphones. They are comfortable and for the price they sound good. I mainly used them for podcasts and voice/video chats anyway.

One major problem with Koss Porta Pro is that they leak. People around you can here even on moderate volume.

Resize me - I'm responsive and mobile first

I have been working with targeted CSS in Drupal themes for modern mobiles like the iPhone for some time now. xdeb.org has implemented it since early 2009, incidentally at the same time I got my first iPhone. This approach has worked well but now with over a third (34 percent) of the visitors to xdeb.org using Android or iOS devices it’s time to take them more seriously.

Upgrade from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 with Migrate 2

When I planed the upgrade to Drupal 7 for xdeb.org I decided to rebuild the site from scratch and use the Migrate module to migrate over content, users, terms etc.

Rebuilding the site made it easy to get rid of some old junk and get a cleaner and more modern structure for xdeb.org. It also gave me a reason to try out the relative new Migrate 2 module. Migrate modules main use is to migrate content from other systems in to Drupal. It works equally well for migrating Drupal to Drupal.

Amazon CloudFront as a CDN for Drupal

When I access xdeb.org from Sweden the site feels reasonable quick and responsive. From other parts of the world it feels less so, even when the Internet connection is good.

The reason is of course that my server is located in Sweden and that location matter on the Internet. Latency and capacity gets worse, in most cases, the bigger the distance is. Ping time to a server close by can be something like 10-20 ms. With a server on the other side of the world the ping time is most likely 300+ ms.

The solution is to move the content closer to the visitors and that can be done with a Content delivery/distribution network, CDN.

Really big players like Google and Facebook build there own systems. They simply build a bunch of data centers all over the world. Big players use CDN services from companies like Akamai and Limelight.

Both options is a bit over my budget for xdeb.org.

BBEdit Clippings for Drupal 7

Rainy days, the just released BBEdit 10 and the fact that all new sites I build now are Drupal 7 has inspired my to update and vastly improve my BBEdit clippings for Drupal.

My BBEdit Clippings for Drupal 7 includes:

  • All hooks
  • All drupal_* functions
  • All devel module print/debug functions
  • Common functions like t, l, url, check_*
  • Control structures like for, if and switch
  • Snippets for doxygen and function
  • Some theme functions for quick insert into template.php.

Download/clone/fork from github.com/frjo/BBEdit-Clippings-for-Drupal

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