Geoff Evason

I’ve been posting a lot of blog entries recently. There are 2 reasons for the increase in frequency. First, it gives me something to do if I’m commuting to the city. Second, and more importantly, it lets me experiment with a variety of things.

My recent posts have been mostly non-technical. I find writing detailed tech posts takes longer.  Instead, as I said, I’m experimenting.  So, what am I experimenting with?

Publicizing.
My new blog posts have been shared via twitter (sorry for any tweet spam), facebook, technorati, readburner, digg, stumbleupon, reddit, rssmeme, and mybloglog. I think the results will be relative to the size of the community I have for each, and since I just signed up recently for most of them I’m not expecting much.  So far reddit is providing the most traffic.

Typo-optimizing.
I’m experimenting with SEO and typos. In a recent post I intentionally misspelled ‘FirendConnect’ twice because I noticed that the google search results for that misspelled term were empty.  I managed to get the #1 spot for that term by doing so.

Diggability
My last post was purely to see how many diggs I could get. There are 2 very common themes among popular digg articles recently: Lists & Anti-Clinton. I figured by writing an anti-Clinton list I might get dugg. I think, however, that you probably need a group of friendly diggers to help get you over an initial threshold.  I only got 5 diggs (nowhere close enough to get dugg).

So, I’ve just recently updated the look and feel of my blog. I previously had a few blogs that I managed and I wanted to consolidate things into one place.

I looked into using some Rails CMSs (radiant, mephisto) but ultimately decided on using wordpress. I really do think Wordpress is the best tool for the job, and it has a great community and lots of plugins!

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. I’ve seen a bunch of blog posts with cool syntax highlighting. I hadn’t been able to figure out how to do it (until I looked at the markup for Tim Lucas’s site).

There are a few Wordpress plugins that let you do this, but none of them really struck me as being what I wanted. After investigating further I found code_highlighter.js by Dan Webb.

Apparently some code highlighters do work on the server side, where as this javascript file moves the work to the client. The idea of this code highlighter is simple. Just include the main code_highlighter.js script and any of the other 4 supported languge packs that you want to use (html, css, js, ruby). I personally just merged the 4 language packs into the main file so I only had one include.

If you are using wordpress, you need to upload the js file somwhere. The nature place is to create a scripts folder in your wordpress root folder. Or, you can create a scripts folder in your theme folder and include it like this:

<script type=“text/javascript” src="wp-content/themes/geoff/js/code_highlighter.js"></script>

I did the latter so that it’s nice and packaged within my theme.

The next step is to style it (which is easy to do using css). Here’s the css I use:

/* Code highlighting (derived from) VibrantInk colours from Justin Palmer @ http://encytemedia.com
*/

 pre {
   padding: 10px;
   overflow: auto;
   width: 100%;
 }
 pre, code {   background-color: #111; }

 /** RUBY / JAVASCRIPT **/
 code span.comment { 	color: #609; }
 code span.string { 	color: #5c2; }
 code span.brackets { }
 code span.symbol { 	color: #777; }
 code span.keywords { 	color: #d72; }

 /** HTML **/
 code.html span.tag { 	color: #ddd; }
 code.html span.attribute { 	color: #d72; }
 code.html span.string { 	color: #5c2; }
 code.html span.comment {	color: #609; }
 code.html span.doctype { 	color: #D7FF80; }

/** CSS **/
code.css .selectors {  color: #d72;}
code.css .properties {  color: #5c2;}