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Is there an npm module to modify a pdf file in node.js?

I'm building a node.js app on Bluemix that should take a pdf file as request and then grey out (blank) some part of the pdf file. And also here the pdf file is the same for all, and the area we need to blank out will be fixed. So can anybody suggest an npm module that can perform this kind of functionality?

Yes I guess the most common used library is pdf-lib. Take a look at the official page.

I suggest you to try HummusPDF. Specifically take a look at the Hummus - Modification page, that explains how to edit existing PDF documents. In your case you could try to use the feature that allows to draw shapes.

Please try Aspose.PDF Cloud SDK for Node.js available at GitHub and npm. It provides API methods for a wide range of document processing operations; including creation, manipulation, conversion and rendering of Pdf documents in the cloud. You can use Redaction Annotation to grey out the required PDF area.
P.S: I work with Aspose as Support Developer

how to embed a github git README file on a website

I am making a website for someone and they want to be able to have that site fetch the github readme markdown file at a certain URL and display it on the website, so that instead of having to write the readme in two places, it just pulls from github. Is that possible? How do I do it? I saw this:
https://github.com/coreyti/showdown
which turns markdown into html, but I'm still not how I would fetch the readme URL and convert it into an object that showdown could parse.
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

You can use StackEdit. It allows you to publish your markdown document on Github and on others locations at the same time in Markdown or HTML format. For instance, you could publish the HTML on a public Google Drive or Dropbox location.
NOTE: I'm the developer of StackEdit

GitHub has an option to show file source, Raw button in top right corner. Raw link for your example is: https://raw.github.com/coreyti/showdown/master/README.md
Assuming that README file is formatted in Markdown already, you could just fetch source and format it on your side, libraries most probably already exist for your language.
UPDATE
I wouldn't actually download file from GitHub every time the page on your site is requested. GitHub may be down, connection may be slow -- and this will affect visitors of your site. Instead, you may want to have a cron job running on the server that would download a file from GitHub, say, every five minutes, and cache it locally. Then, every time you need to display the file, you'll read a local copy and don't depend on GitHub server being accessible. As a drawback, you will have a certain synchronization delay (5 minutes in my example).

Heroku seems to be doing it by copying the rendered html https://elements.heroku.com/buildpacks/stouffi/heroku-i18n-js-buildpack-ruby#buildpack-instructions

I’ve written riss.awk to insert a README.md on your website, optionally performing some transformations in the process.
be able to have that site fetch the github readme
You can automatically fetch the original README.md file like this:
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cljoly/readme-in-static-site/main/README.md | awk -f riss.awk >readme-in-static-site.md
convert it into an object that showdown could parse
I couldn’t find showdown’s documentation, but there might be some kind of API you could use to upload the file generated above (readme-in-static-site.md)? A cronjob-like task could then run this process every few hours to keep things up to date.

Cross Browser, Object Persistence Library for Client Application

I'm creating a client based application in HTML Application (HTA) and I would like to know if there's a object persistent library similar to python's shevle that meets the following criteria:
Should be able to read and write on file
Cross browser: should work at least on both HTA and on Firefox (through XULRunner) so that I'll be not tied to any vendor.
Written in JavaScript form
TiddyWiki is able to save itself, regardless of the browser used, though the codes that saves and retrieves files has to be refactored to meet my need.

Well, I wasn't aware that TiddyWiki has a github repository, and they organized the files by module.
I could just take the FileSystem.js file and build a nice api on top of it to simulate shelve functionality.

HTML 5 File API

I hear that Firefox 3.6 adds support for the HTML local file API (Announcement here).
Does this mean that I can access local files from javascript?
Can anyone point me to examples for reading / writing local files?
I would love to be able to read / write simple text files.

The only files you can access are files dropped from the desktop or files that has been selected from an <input/> tag. See the demo I've written here: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/12/uploading-files-with-xmlhttprequest/

It doesn't allow accessing arbitrary local files. It's more of a file upload improvement. For instance, you can have some Javascript accept a drag-and-drop file initiated by the user of the browser.
You can find the W3C spec on it here.

Take a look at the demo at hacks.mozilla.org.

You can find a (mozilla-specific explanation of the API on the Mozilla Development Center.

It's possible to write to local file system, but the user must complete a 'save as...' action. For now, no direct access to client file system. Take a look here

blogengine without php or asp.net etc

Is there a way to have a blog directly integrated into my HTML/javascript-only website, without having to have something like a SQL-database and a dynamic engine like PHP or MySQL?
Maybe there is some service in the web that offers this (hopefully without ads :) ). Or maybe I can have a blog engine entirely written in javasript?

Entirely written in JavaScript? Surely that defeats the entire point of having a "blog-engine" in the first place? The point being that the data is stored somewhere and dynamically retrieved. To avoid using anything server-side (which seems to be your intent), and only use HTML/JavaScript, you'd have to store all the data for the blog in files that are served up to each visitor, and then retrieve the data from the particular, local, locations using JavaScript.
Sorry if I'm misunderstanding the point here... but this seems to be an utterly useless way of trying to go about things. Blogs are, in general, either written statically (in HTML [even though this is rare]), or are dynamically generated from a database by a server-side scripting language (most common).
Edit: As an additional point, I suppose you could include some third-party blog feed, or service, in your page, via use of JavaScript... but I'm unsure as to which (if any) blogging services would directly support this method of working. Additionally, this is quite an unreliable way of including third-party data in a page...

Here's a thought. It's not really a blog engine - but a wiki.
Entirely javascript/html/css. All lives in a single html file:
http://www.tiddlywiki.com/
not sure how it would work on a real live site, but their site is using it:
* A personal notebook
* A GTD ("Getting Things Done") productivity tool
* A collaboration tool
* For building websites (this site is a TiddlyWiki file!)
* For rapid prototyping
* ...and much more!

You could use github pages. You will get a generated blog with version control.

Other option is to use a Desktop blog tool and then update your site.
You can user iWeb if you have a Mac or CityDesk on Windows or you may try this open source tool
Edit Today I came across this tool: Zeta producer that may help.

http://code.google.com/p/showdown-blog/
Blog engine written in just JS and XML [v0.6] {JavaScript, XML}

So, what you want is to have a blog where you're website provider doesn't provide a way to serve dynamic content?
The only way I see that you can do it in that case is writing html-files (or text-files if you prefer) and adding them to the site. After that you can have some JavaScript to add them to your "blog-page".
You of course need to upload them to the website in the same way as you do for the other files, and then have a way for the JavaScript to know which pages it should fetch.
I am not aware of any JavaScript blog-engines, but you can have a look at the templating functions in for instance Prototype
Of course, that means that you will have to fetch both the template and the content through Ajax and let the client do all the processing (could be slow and possibly insecure), and you still need to have a place to upload the content and update it.

Your best bet is going to be using a generator to create the HTML/CSS/JS to upload to your server, take a look at Webby: http://webby.rubyforge.org/

IF you really need to you can use a public api for a service that lets you post small bits of info and retrieve it using javascript.
for example if you only need small posts you can make a blog in html.javascript that utilizes twitter as the engine. of course you will be limited to 140 chars. I am sure there are other services that will allow a similar idea but with less restrictions.
And of course the best option - Get a blog software or host your blog with a service provider and link to it from you site.
Good luck

One solution would be to use some application that generates the static web pages of your blog, and uploads them to your web server. This way you'd have a blog with static content that could all be managed in javascript alongside your existing site, without needing to install database, daemon software, or additional dynamic web programming languages on your server. The static content generation could happen directly on your server if possible, or you could run the html generation tool locally and upload the output.
MoveableType has a tool like this. You still need somewhere to store the content of your blog, and for this MoveableType uses MySQL by default, so you'd still need to install a database somewhere, but the database could simply be one your local desktop.
MoveableType also has support via plugins or older versions that can retrieve data from a sqlite or other database. The advantage of sqlite is that it doesn't require installing daemons like MySQL does, you can just put a sqlite file on disk somewhere, give MoveableType the path to the file, and run the script to generate your static content.
There are likely other tools like MoveableType, and I have in the past generated blog-like web pages simply by writing small scripts to generate HTML. The main issue is just that you need somewhere for these scripts to fetch data from.
Another option might be to develop your blog using XSLT, ... with XSLT, you'd put the content of your pages in XML files, and then write a template in XSL that converts your XML to HTML.
If you google for 'static blog site generation' you might find other ideas/options, including Jekyll/github mentioned in one of the other responses.