Following on in the series of how I have improved my blog, its time to address the issue of syntax highlighting. I admit, this is something which I think has really let me down and something which is long overdue.

There are a number of difference approaches available to solve this problem, however the best approach I came across is from http://alexgorbatchev.com/wiki/SyntaxHighlighter. This is a javascript+css library which can be installed on your blog, which thankfully is a very simply task. The CSS you need to reference are the following:

The javascript I have referenced in shown below.

In my posts, I can then simply wrap the snippet in a pre block and assign the appropriate brush class to highlight the syntax.

public string test()
{
return "abc";
}

The following are a list of brushes for the different languages I have referenced.

C# - c-sharp
CSS - css
JavaScript - js
Java - java
Ruby - ruby
Python - python
Scala - scala
SQL - sql
Xml - xml

For those who are using Windows Live Writer, there is a plugin to make syntax highlighting even easier! This is available to download from http://www.codeplex.com/precode

Hopefully this should make code much easier to read in the future. Another approach I was tempted by is using GitHub Gists. Gists are snippets of code hosted on github which you can then embed into your posts, as shown below.

The reason I didn't go down this route is that it makes it difficult to insert code when writing a blog 'offline' and when GitHub is down. As a result, I decided to stick with the classic approach for now. But what do you think?

Labels: Blogging