Sharing code with the world

The main reason I started writing this blog was to share snippets of things I find interesting or as a way to document any solutions I come up with that I would like to share. The problem with the web though, is formatting. When you copy and paste code from your code editor into a web form, things don't go as expected. Some pages will try to interpret the code blocks and in some cases can even cause the page to break. Most of the time, indentation is ignored and sometimes line breaks too.

I started doing the formatting by hand at first and quickly found that while possible, my posts will spend more time being edited than written. The biggest issue I had was that the output was just bland. Blocks of code were getting lost in the rest of the page.

That's when I found SyntaxHighlighter. This CSS/JS library can be used to not only format blocks of code very nicely, it adds line numbers and syntax highlighting for all of the main languages I use, mainly ColdFusion. It also has theme support, which I use Sublime Text 3 as my main editor with the Monoki color scheme and the theme I found, RDark, matches it pretty well. I may end up writing a Monoki theme for SyntaxHighlighter, but that may have to come a bit later.

So now, code blocks just need to be surrounded with a <pre> tag and a brush set to the language it is and SyntaxHighlighter will do the rest for me:

<pre class="brush: java">
 int test=7;
 int y = 5;
</pre>

 int test=7;
 int y = 5;

This makes the code easier to read, but as for writing, I needed to find a way to make that easier. I'll go into details about how I did that in an upcoming post.