This year, I’ve converted the bulk of my content into Markdown – a simple way of formatting text files in a way that can be rendered into HTML.

Not out of choice, really. It was the only solution if I wanted to:

• Edit files on my iPad / iPhone (I’ve started doing that a lot more recently)
• Allow the contents to be viewable as HTML as well as text, and
• Allow non techies to edit the file

As a bonus, it’s already the format Github and Bitbucket use for markup.

If you toss Dropbox into the mix, there’s a powerful solution there. You can share files via Dropbox as Markdown, and publish them as web pages. There are already a number of solutions that let you do this. DropPages.com and Pancake.io let you share Dropbox files as web pages. Calepin.co lets you blog using Dropbox.

My needs were a bit simpler, however. I sometimes publish Markdown files on Dropbox that I want to see in a formatted way – without having to create an account. Just to test things, or share temporarily.

Enter Markdress.org. My project for this morning.

Just add any URL after markdress.org to render it as Markdown. For example, to render the file at http://goo.gl/zTG1q, visit http://markdress.org/goo.gl/zTG1q.

To test it out, create any text file in your Dropbox public folder, get the public link:

… and append it to http://markdress.org/ without the http:// prefix.

A month ago, I was at the theatre watching Ra.One. The movie was terrible, yet enjoyable. But I’m going to talk about something else – a song I heard that caught my imagination.

The song is Phir Se Ud Chala from Rockstar. Around 14 seconds into the video, you’ll hear a guitar start off at the background. That’s what caught my ear first – because I’d heard it before. Listen to this piece below:

Mystic light

I’d created this a couple of months ago with GarageBand on my iPad2. It just plays two Apple Loops one after another.

The first one that you hear – Cheerful Mandolin 07 – is exactly the same background music that you hear in Phir Se Ud Chala. Guess A R Rahman uses GarageBand too!

(The strange thing is, I found no mention of this anywhere on the internet, as of 2 Dec 2011. Thought I’d have a go and be the first… just in case someone searches for Apple Loops or GarageBand in Phir Se Ud Chala from Rockstar.)