Everyone knows (or should know) what the Pi number is. Basically, its value is defined by the division of a circle circumference to its diameter. That's the Pi number! The nice thing about it is its irrational nature. That means it has a lot an infinity of decimals.

Usually, Pi is approximated as 3.14. And today is 14th of March! So, happy Pi day! :)

I have a Raspberry Pi computer around, and I was thinking to use two of my libraries to create something nice: displaying the Raspberry Pi's logo and the Pi number in the command line: it's funny how it basically stands for Raspberry Pi (the raspberry image and the pi number). I wanted one more thing: using the pi number decimals in the output characters. Here's the result (see below how I did it):

How I did it

Playing computer games is a lot of fun. Playing games improving brain function and performance is even better. The first computer game I ever played was one of these. ⚡️

It happened when I was 6-year-old. I visited a friend in the neighboring village. There were not so many computers in those days but my friend had one. He asked me to play a computer game he thought I would enjoy. And I did! It was my favorite computer game at the time (back in 2001).

The game I played was Memory Blocks, which is part of the Symantec Game Pack, created by Charles Timmerman—founder of Funster and author of over 90 puzzle books.

Since then I did a lot of things. One of them is that I became a web developer. So, I thought: it should be interesting to bring this Windows game back to life and everyone will be able to play it in their browsers (on any platform). Many people love oldies. Not long time ago I created a COBOL bridge for Node.js and the feedback was amazing.

I love and use both JSON and Markdown in my projects. Each npm package requires a package.json file which is obviously written in JSON format. Also, good projects have good documentation. My favorite language for writing docs is Markdown.

But I don't really write Markdown files. I do write docs, but they are stored in the code (JSDoc comments). I automated the process of generating Markdown docs using Blah. However, sometimes these documentation templates are not enough.

That's why I created json2md which is the bridge between JSON and Markdown languages. Integrating this package with my Blah templates, I can write custom things in the final documentation result using JSON inputs in my package.json (or another JSON file).

How to use

Bible is full of beautiful verses that encourage us and light our path in this world. While they all are important, I have some favorite passages that I like in special. Here are seven of them. 💫

John 3.16

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Few months ago I was introducing Blah–one of nicest tools I ever used in module/project development. It helped me a lot. Literally. More than 80% of my projects documentation was generated by this tool.

Recently I started building some new features, working on the 2.0.0 milestone of this project and finally, the 2.0.0 branch was merged. 97 commits, 34 files changed, and 1.659 lines changed (1,197 additions, 462 deletions). Cool, right? Let's see what's hiding behind these numbers.

The new big feature is templates. There are three levels of Blah templates:

As of 20th of August, 2015, I discontinued this project:

⚠️ This project is discontinued and deprecated. By reserving NPM packages without publishing code, you are violating the NPM terms. For more information please refer to Acceptable Package Content

I created a tiny tool for visualizing the programming languages collected from someone's GitHub repositories. It is available here, being hosted on GitHub pages.

Below, you can see an embeded chart with my programming languages:

We get the data via the GitHub API and then render the language stats using drawPieChart.

It also has an API for embeding (you already saw I embeded it in this article). You can embed it via an <iframe> element which looks like this (replace username with your username):

In this article I will describe how to upload files using Lien and Formidable, after creating a NodeJS HTTP server.

Lien is a tiny high-level framework for creating HTTP servers, being one of the libraries which power Bloggify.

Formidable is a NodeJS module for parsing form data and file uploads. We will use it to create a file upload interface in a Lien server.

First of all, create the directory structure:

I released the initial version of Bloggify social plugin, adding the functionality to share the articles on social networks.

Check out the plugin source. The CSS and HTML are generated by this social builder which is really cool!

To find more about Bloggify, check out the Bloggify website.