So obviously anyone wanting to write technical blog posts will eventually require code snippets on the posts. Posting code is not very difficult. The basic part is just that you want the browser to know that your text is code and it should not apply standard html formatting to it; wrapping lines, etc. The key ingredient to this is the html tag pre. It tells the browser that the following is special. It really just means that the inner text of the tag is preformatted, and that the browser should do nothing but display the text. Very useful for displaying code snippets. Especially if the snippets are html snippets. Wouldn't it be bad if the browser rendered the code you were trying to show people.
So great we have preformatted text, but it still doesn't look nice at all. Well I could sit there and color the snippets and spend time formatting it nicely, but I use Windows Live Writer. Great tool. I blogged about why I like Windows Live Writer in the past, and the add-ins I am about to mention simply add to my admiration of this tool. There are a few great code snippet inserting tools. Which let you choose a language and it will format the code nicely including some coloring for you. Some will give you containers and fancy alternating lines. I've settled on no container without lines. It seems to work well enough for my purposes. Not too fancy, but still readable enough to allow the code to be useful to others.
I hope that is useful to people out there. I highly recommend these code snippet inserting tools. Also I recommend Windows Live Writer and the plug-ins for it. There are a lot of useful tools for this application. (Yes, I am using Windows Live Writer for this message.)
Happy blogging!
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