Now that I have some content, and a nice habit of writing every day, I’ve started concentrating a little more on how this blog looks, especially since the May 1st reboot is only 8 days away!

To start, since this is a blog mainly about writing some form of code or another I needed a good way to do some syntax highlighting. My requirements were pretty simple, it should require very little manual intervention beyond the <code><pre></pre></code> tags, it should support HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Java, and possibly Ruby and PHP, and line numbers would be nice. I found all of this in the wonderful wp-syntax plug-in by Ryan McGeary based on the GeSHi Generic Syntax Highlighter.

Setting it up was a breeze, as usual for WordPress plug-ins, upload, unzip, and it works. Creating the markup was also pretty simple, since all of my code blocks were already wrapped in <code><pre></pre></code> it was just a matter of adding the appropriate lang attribute to the pre element. I did however, run into one minor problem, I had all of my HTML code escaped to to use &lt; and &gt; instead of < and >, but one quick search and replace in MarsEdit for each post, and that was solved as well.