Best Weblog Application for Posting Source Code?

BrewerDude asks: "I've set up a blog about programming (URL withheld: this isn't about self-promotion). I'm currently using one of the popular blog hosting services, but find it lacking when it comes to handling source code snippets in posts. It's even worse when it comes to dealing with code snippets that people include in their comments. At this point I'm frustrated enough that I'm ready to move from that service to something else. Ideally, I'm looking for something that will handle syntax highlighting for a variety of languages and do this for both the posts and the comments. I'd prefer a hosted solution, but am not opposed to installing and maintaining my own instance of a blog application if necessary. What have you found to be the best blog application when it comes to supporting posts and comments that include source code?"

Google...

Top result: http://www.google.com/search?q=coding+blog [google.com] is powered by something I'd never heard of called Community Server http://communityserver.org/ [communityserver.org].

I'm currently using one of the popular blog hosting services, but find it lacking when it comes to handling source code snippets in posts.

I can see what you mean after swiftly browsing some of the other sites that came near the top of the above search... I would have thought WordPress would have a plugin though...

use slashcode

#include <stdio.h>

void main()
{
    printf ("only joking!\n");
}

Re:use slashcode

I gues you wanted to use one of the actually allowed signatures of the main function:

int main(void) { }
int main(int argc, char * argv[]) { }

DokuWiki

It's not a blog service/package per se (although there are some blogging-type plugins for it) but I find DokuWiki [splitbrain.org] to be excellent at handling code snippets with decent syntax highlighting, and easy to use.

An example bit of code can be done as easily as:

<code perl>
# some code here
</code>

Ikiwiki + source code coloring from Trac

Ikiwiki ( http://ikiwiki.kitenet.net/ [kitenet.net] ) is a really extendable wiki/blog-software and you could write a plugin in the style of Trac's Syntax Coloring support ( http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracSyntaxColoring [edgewall.org] )

JavaScript syntax highlighting

Dean Edwards' javascript syntax highlighter handles several languages (you can easily add your own) and operates via DHTML behaviors so you don't even need to include the script files in the page. It works in most browsers.

http://dean.edwards.name/my/examples/star-light/ [edwards.name]

What you need to use it is a blog that will let you post files to the server or create your own custom HTML templates, and then let people post HTML code. Code wrapped in <pre class="javascript"> gets highlighted correctly.

If you can't post files, a bit of hacking around with the source code and you can embed it in a template and invoke it manually with javascript.

Wordpress lets you post your own HTML templates with script - either install it on your own server or go for their free hosted service at wordpress.com.

This *IS* about self promotion...

I use Blogger [blogspot.com] and I've found that I have no problem communicating in code. Syntax hilighting for different languages? Uhh no, but maybe if you recommended it to Google they'd do it as a summer of code project or something. In any case, I bet my blog is way geekier than yours!

You *are* a programmer

You know, as a programmer, you could write it yourself...

Syntax highlighter

Not sure about a decent blog... but for highlighting code, geshi [qbnz.com] does a nice job.

Not a blog, but...

Well, I faced a similar need some time ago. I ended up using MoinMoin [wikiwikiweb.de]. I know, it's not a blogging software, it's a wiki, but in my case it does the job. There might be some other choices available at the wiki-front, but MoinMoin has syntax-colorisation for some programming languages built-in (Python, C, SH scripts if I remember correctly, I had a need for Python only).

Copy Source as HTML

If you're using Visual Studio and you want your code snippits to look like they do in the IDE then I highly recommend the Copy Source as HTML [jtleigh.com] plugin. It takes your code and produces a very clean HTML copy, correctly indented and colored, which you can then paste into your post.

You can see an example of it in a blog post here [newtonsoft.com].

Plain text, fixed font?

How about some plain-old-text displayed using fixed size font?

pastecode

I think http://pastecode.com/ [pastecode.com] is what you are looking for

Wordpress

Wordpress is a great option.

vim + nanoblogger

Here is what I do it, using nanoblogger [sf.net] and using vim as my editor. I wouuld rely on vim Syntax handling ablities and covert the portion of the code into :TOHtml.

You want Drupal + appropriate filter

Drupal and the codefilter module will do a good job of supporting basic code entry in any arbitrary language. If you want robust support for highlighting for multiple languages, take a look at GeSHIFilter.

http://drupal.org/ [drupal.org]
http://drupal.org/project/codefilter [drupal.org]
GeSHIFilter: http://drupal.org/node/65961 [drupal.org] and demo: http://www.ubisum.com/node/27 [ubisum.com]

Blogger by any other name?

You're talking about Blogger, right? Its Composer is sort of OK for anything but source code. When you do want to use it for code, it reveals its donkey-penis-sucking nature. I tried every which way, but it is so amazingly dumb that it will turn &gt; into >, and then choke on the spurious HTML-esque tags that are created.

How did I get around this limitation? I turned off "Turn new lines into <br>" in the prefs, and edited the post in HTML mode (I didn't ever click on the Composer or Preview tab). Does this suck? Yes. A lot.

Eventually I think I'll just freak out and take a screenshot of the code or something equally inane, and then I'll be able to turn the newline option back on, as having it off is quite irritating to me.

d.

WordPress + a plugin

I've definitely seen a code highlight plugin for WordPress, but as I can't find it.. you could always write your own. WordPress is pretty ubiquitous now, writing plugins is simple, and it'd just be a call to a highlighting library for any code within <code> tags.

Serendipity + geshi plugin

I would suggest serendipity [s9y.org] for the blogging software itself with the geshi plugin that is available through it's plugin interface. Though I've never used the plugin I've heard it works well and I find the software (serendipity) to be highly configurable and just all around excellent.

I've tried two

WordPress is brutal with HTML. It treats < as a tag delimiter, &lt; as a tag delimiter. The numeric entity &#60; (I think) is the only one it won't explode into a raw character. Blogger is much easier to do code in. < by itself is treated as HTML but &lt; works. For what it's worth.

Use separate syntax highlighting programs.

If you really need the outputted HTML files inline on the page, you can just use a bit of regex to chop off the HTML header.

Wordpress + VIM Syntax Plugin

Wordpress has a plugin that uses some vim magic to syntax highlight code.

It may be computationally expensive (I dunno), but there's always the wordpress caching plugin as well. ;)

Emacs Muse

I just killed my Wordpress install over at Etherplex in favor of Emacs Muse [mwolson.org]. If you are an Emacs user already, Muse is a snap to use, and is a general document generator that can output to LaTeX, HTML, RDF, RSS and something called journal-html, which is designed specifically for blogs and is designed to be styled by a custom CSS. You can see the results over at my site.

If you want to see the source file in emacs that generated that, check out the muse source [etherplex.org] for my site. Keep in mind that when using it in Emacs, the markup doesn't actually appear - it is converted to the proper fonts on-the-fly in Emacs.

In this context, the use of htmlize [fej0wr.hr] is perfect for generating an HTML form of your code buffer from emacs. Whatever your color scheme, htmlize will pick up the colors and use them to generate the HTML. If you're not publishing an entire page, I suggest you set htmlize to use the "font" method for generating html that can be used without corresponding matching CSS. If you use Emacs color-theme [emacswiki.org] package, the theme "BlippBlopp" produces good results for publishing on the web.

The only thing this system lack that I care about is comments, but since no one reads my blog, its not that big of an issue. I installed SimpleMachine's SMF [simplemachines.org] for blog comments and other forum needs. Vanilla [getvanilla.com] may also be a good choice.

Finally, it's worth mentioning that I can then edit my site from anywhere via Tramp mode [emacswiki.org] in Emacs, which allows seamless file editting on remote servers over SSH. This way, I can edit my site from my laptop on the road, or my deskktop at home without worrying about having the code with me. Muse will then publish remotely as well (though there seems to be a bug with RSS generation and Tramp that I need to work out).

Why should this be part of the blogging software?

Why not find blogging software that can handle user-entered HTML snippets and use something like colorer [sourceforge.net] (one of a few out there) to generate HTML from code. If the blogging package also gave you the ability to add an iframe in your story, you could also point that at a web CVS/SVN repository viewer that has syntax coloring (most do) for the cases where you're posting the code of a source file rather than a snippet.

This kind of solution is likely to be much cleaner and give you better results than looking for a blogging package that can handle code natively. Even if you were able to find such a package, it's unlikely it would be able to handle as many languanges as the packages that are dedicated to displaying code in an HTML format.

Test out several on opensourcecms.com

opensourcecms.com [opensourcecms.com] They let you try out blogs also, not just CMSes

Drupal + GeSHiFilter

If you do not mind hosting your own solution, the look into installing Drupal [drupal.org] and the GeSHiFilter [drupal.org] module.

You can also get a pre-hosted account at Bryght [bryght.com], but it is not free like other blogging services.

Disclaimer: I am a contributor to the Drupal project.

finger and .plan?

Worked great for John Carmack and Brian Hook!

TWiki with plugins

TWiki (http://twiki.org/) has plugins that handle source code formatting (see http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/SourceHighli ghtPlugin [twiki.org] and http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/SyntaxHighli ghtingPluginDev [twiki.org]) and others provide blog features (http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/BlogPlugin looks pretty good). (Some tweaking required for the syntax highlighting plugins to work with latest TWiki version).

TWiki's generally great for intranet collaboration as it has good revision tracking, WYSIWYG editing (beta) and other nice features, as well as over 200 plugins including some that support action tracking, Extreme Programming support, etc.

Re: Best Weblog Application for Posting Source...

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Re:URL withheld...

Mods: it's not offtopic, it's funny!