Cluefeed: a social know-how aggregator

I like reading through inspiring articles that extend my know-how, especially articles about web development. However, I find it hard to find good articles. I find some through postings by people I follow on Twitter, some via Google, and some by regularly visiting websites like Smashing Magazine.

One day I though: Wouldn't it be nice if there was a website that aggregates all the good, inspiring articles? What if people could rate them, so I know if they waste my time before I've read through them?

That thought, I developed Cluefeed (www.cluefeed.com).

In short, Cluefeed is a social know-how aggregator.

Everyone can post links to good articles. Other people browse the catalog of articles, read the ones they like, and rate the articles. That's it. Simple, but useful.

How to reduce PDF file size in Linux

Using a single line of GhostScript command on my Ubuntu's terminal, I was able to reduce the size of a  PDF file from 6 MB to approximately 1 MB:

gs -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf

You can also use the following parameters for -dPDFSETTINGS instead of /screen:

• /screen - Lowest quality, lowest size
• /ebook - Moderate quality
• /printer - Good quality
• /prepress - Best quality, highest size

How to use PrettyPrint to format source code in Blogger

If you want to format source code posted to Blogger (BlogSpot), you can use PrettyPrint. PrettyPrint is a JavaScript library that does client-side source code formatting.

Testing Responsive Designs with Opera Mobile Emulator

When it comes to testing responsive webdesigns, testing with real mobile devices can hardly be replaced with anything. However, testing alpha versions of your web project can be done easier. I've read an article about Opera Mobile Emulator today on Smashing Magazine, and it seems to be quite useful. It's Opera Mobile available for regular computers, allowing for checking how a website looks and behaves at different resolutions and pixel densities.

Moving to Google's Blogger

I've moved my blog to Google's Blogger (formerly known as Blogspot). Some of the "old" links are not working anymore due to the move, sorry. If you notice any issues (i.e. wrongly formatted posts), please let me know.

Benchmark: RESTful Service Performance of Node.js vs. JAX-RS

Over the past few months, I've read more and more about Node.js. Besides its simplicity in creating a web application's server part, the superior performance of Node.js was stressed very often.

I decided to run a little benchmark.

The scenario: A RESTful web service that receives the first letter of a city, looks up all cities beginning with the supplied letter in a MySQL database, and returns the cities' names and IDs using JSON.

Determining a location's federal state using Google Maps API

If you have to find out which federal state a city belongs to, you can use the Google Maps API v3. Here is a straightforward JavaScript code snippet: