Friday, October 31, 2008

Code Highlighters For Your Blog

I recently tweeted that I thought the SyntaxHighlighter is the best way to display code on your blog. In response, I had some who were a little confused how to get started with the tool. The tool isn't as straight forward as some other tools. There are several steps you will need to take in order for it to work on your blog.

Since my tweet, I have reconsidered my initial recommendation for new users. The look and features of SyntaxHighlighter are nice, but it does take some setup on your blog, some manual manipulation of your code, and presents a slight delay during render time (since it is dynamically manipulated via JavaScript).

I plan to start using SyntaxHighligher from now on and I would recommend it for bloggers that post a lot of code, but if you an occasional code poster, then one of the following Windows Live Writer plug-ins might be a better solution for you (they are much simpler and faster to render and takes no setup on your blog). All that said, you might even like the plug-ins better than SyntaxHighlighter... and hey, that's fine by me :)

The Windows Live Writer plug-ins that I recommend are...

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous7:50 AM

    Hey,

    Funny you should mention that.

    I didn't even think about implementing
    a entry editor in my blog, just because I love Windows Live Writer and the syntaxhighlighter plugin so much. I didn't see the need to have a web based editor :-)

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  2. I tried the Code Snippet plugin and the Paste from VS plugin today. Both of these worked great, but Paste from VS seemed to get a little closer to the actual code. I'm looking forward to trying syntaxhighlighter!

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  3. Anonymous12:40 AM

    http://www.neathighlighter.com is an easy to use code highlighter and is the only highlighter which supports different language codes in a single file

    ReplyDelete