soledad penadés » wordpress

New SyHi version: 0.0.4

sole — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 20:47:30 +0000

I checked GeSHi today and saw there had been lots of updates since the last time I updated my Syntax Highlighting plug-in for WordPress, SyHi. There was even support for retrosexy languages such as 6502 and 68000 assembler, and zxbasic–which prompted me to immediately update my plug-in so that people can post code snippets for Commodore 64, Nintendo Entertainment System, Amigaaaah or ZXSpectrum!

So with this new version, there’s support for the following new syntaxes, in addition to the existing ones: 4cs, 6502acme, 6502kickass, 6502tasm, 68000devpac, algol68, autoconf, autohotkey, awk, chaiscript, clojure, cuesheet, e, ecmascript, f1, fsharp, gambas, gdb, genie, go, gwbasic, hicest, icon, j, jquery, lb, logtalk, magiksf, mapbasic, mmix, modula2, newlisp, objeck, oxygene, oz, perl6, pf, pike, postgresql, powerbuilder, pcre, purebasic, q, rpmspec, rsplus, systemverilog, unicon, vala, xbasic, and zxbasic.

The full list of supported syntaxes can be read at my SyHi page.

You can download the plug-in from its WordPress.org page or from its github repository. If you have already installed it, you don’t need to do anything: it will prompt you to upgrade at some point when you log into the WP admin area–the upgrade process is absolutely straightforward and you just need to press the upgrade button! :-)

Delicatessen v2

sole — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:27:39 +0000

Let me introduce Delicatessen v2, the new version of my WordPress plug-in for finding out who’s bookmarked your posts in delicious.com

It has taken a bit too long to produce this version, but it at last behaves like a nice netizen, and won’t spam delicious.com with too many queries in a very little time, therefore you won’t get banned ;)

More info and downloads in the Delicatessen page.

SyHi: my minimalistic syntax highlighting plug-in for WordPress

sole — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:50:43 +0000

I had been using Code Snippet for a year, or a couple of years (I can’t really remember), and was more or less happy with it. Apart from the fact that it didn’t preserve some stuff properly, like double dashes and quotes. So then I tried adding another plug-in to the mix, Preserve Code Formatting. But both at the same time didn’t work out as I ~~expected~~ hoped.

The solution?

I made a new plug-in. It’s very minimalistic, starting with its name: SyHi.

How does it work?

The problem with other plug-ins is that they apply their formatting and then let WordPress continue modifying the posts’ text. That’s a totally bad idea, and that’s why quotes and dashes were systematically altered. On the other hand, this little clever plug-in takes the code blocks apart, sets them aside while leaving placeholder text where they were, and when WordPress has finished with all its filtering and texturizing, SyHi replaces the placeholder texts with the preserved, syntax highlighted beatiful pieces of code that the author entered.

The resulting code not only is nice to look at, but can be copied and pasted into a compiler and it will work with no modifications at all. No more please replace em dashes with double hyphens because WordPress modified the snippet’s output…: your blog readers can now simply copy and paste!

Alphatesters needed

So far I have tested SyHi with a test blog and this blog too. It looks fine, but I would be more than happy if somebody else wants to have a go at testing it. I would even add you to the Thanks section!

~~Unfortunately, the plug-in is not yet available in the wp-plugins directory; I’m waiting for them to approve my request so that you can install it from within the plugins admin page.~~

Plug-in page at WordPress directory: SyHi. You can also clone the SyHi github repository or download the latest version from there.

Samples

So you don’t believe me when I say this plug-in works great?

Using Python

noise_output = wave.open('noise.wav', 'w')

noise_output.setparams((2, 2, 44100, 0, 'NONE', 'not compressed'))



for i in range(0, SAMPLE_LEN):

        value = random.randint(-32767, 32767)

        packed_value = struct.pack('h', value)

        noise_output.writeframes(packed_value)

        noise_output.writeframes(packed_value)



noise_output.close()

What about php?

class SyHi

{

        protected $code_blocks;

        protected $geshi_instance = null;



        public function __construct()

        {

                // Execute pre and post process functions before and after each post content is processed

                add_filter('the_content', array(&$this, 'pre_process'), 2);

                add_filter('the_content', array(&$this, 'post_process'), 1000);



                // Same for each comment

                add_filter('comment_text', array(&$this, 'pre_process'), 2);

                add_filter('comment_text', array(&$this, 'post_process'), 1000);



                // Add the css stylesheet link to the 

                add_action('wp_head', array(&$this, 'add_css'), 1);

        }

}

OK and what about C/C++?

void luisita_reportErrors(lua_State *L, int st)

{

    if (st != 0)

    {

        std::cerr << "ERROR -- " << lua_tostring(L, -1) << std::endl;

        lua_pop(L, 1); // removes error message

    }

}

As you can see, double dashes are being respected, quotes are kept as they are, and code is nicely highlighted. And if you’re still feeling skeptical, keep browsing posts in this blog, since all code snippets go through SyHi.

Update: added the link to the plug-in’s repository :)

Update 2: let me clarify something: this plug-in can beautify snippets in pretty much every programming language you can think of, thanks to the huge language support provided by GeSHi. I have shown you only three examples as a simple demonstration, but you can even show Z80 assembler code!

The full list of supported languages is in the left column of the GeSHi website, under the Supported Languages header. Heck, it even has support for a language called BrainFuck!

“If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to the RSS feed”

sole — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 09:03:23 +0000

And I wonder… why? Why would I want to do that? I just arrived at your site from Google, looking for something which maybe is not exactly what I will find here. I am just looking for something sporadic and very specific. Do you really think your ridiculous message at the top, right where my eyes begin scanning for the information I am looking for, is going to make me –a complete stranger, alien to your words and your editorial line– feel compelled to subscribe to your RSS feed to read your semi-daily musings about God knows what?

I’ll give you the short answer: No!

Most of these messages are generated thanks to the What would Seth Godin Do plugin. While I appreciate the effort of the developer and also think that welcoming newcomers is always a great idea, I am not sure you can build any kind of loyalty by using the plugin and not even changing the default text that comes with it.

The only way of capturing people who get to your blog via a search engine is to offer interesting content. If I like what I find, and the site navigation is nice and easy, without an Adsense ad in between every piece of content, I will probably have a look by myself and maybe I may subscribe to your feed. If, on top of that, you want to add a short Hello, new visitor! message explaining what your site is about, great. But please change the default text or you risk being Yet another WordPress weblog.

Bits & bites

sole — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 10:46:35 +0000

Welcome to the first in a long series of posts which sum up several unrelated thoughts. Today we have comments on the latest announcements of Apple regarding Snow Leopard, the failure and success of Bing, and the greatness of WordPress 2.8 and Twitter (sometimes). Come on, the food is ready and the table is set!

On Apple’s announcements about upcoming Snow Leopard

Proud Apple person decides to say a few triumphant words about the success of their strategy vs Microsoft’s one… in public. Something along the lines of we’re so great and you’re in such a big trouble, man!. Makes me laugh: for all that I know, since the first day I installed Leopard I have had nothing but trouble. If that’s a good operating system, I’m happy of not having any Vista-running computer.

Then, about the upcoming version of Mac OS X, is there anything interesting to speak about? Is there any type of breakthrough concept that will really revolutionize the way we think about computers, so to speak in hyperblasting marketing terms? No, there isn’t anything that could be labeled that way:

a new version of Safari – which essentially incorporates the same eyecandy idea they developed for iTunes covers and then a few functions that aren’t surprising, rather something to be expected at some point in every browser: Top Sites and History search. They also remark pompously about the speed of their javascript engine — except everybody serious about browsers is optimising their js engines too. This obviously doesn’t include Microsoft, of course.
a new version of QuickTime – oooh! including things that were only available for QuickTime Pro users. They probably noticed too many people running VLC which allows fullscreen without having to enter a serial number, and thought that was abominating. Hence they freed several functions from the Pro version, to avoid people using non-Apple software.
basically the same Finder, Expose and Stacks ancient, unfinished and unpolished technology
and compatibility with Microsoft Exchange, which will only ring a bell if you use such thing

They should rather be dispatched in a Software Update, but that would prove they have been playing with all games in the iPhone store and not doing their homework meanwhile. Funnily, what could really be interesting (64 bit support, Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL) is hardly heard of. Even though, 64 bit support is not a new idea, GCD will only work if applications are recompiled to make use of it (as far as I understand) and OpenCL is pretty much the same.

I’m happy to read, though, that Snow Leopard won’t support PowerPC computers. That will force me to finally switch to Linux on my laptop when Mozilla stops providing updates for Firefox, for example. If that was an strategy for making people buy new computers for running their new operating system, it didn’t work here, sorry.

Bing? Bong!

The ‘new’ Microsoft search engine was unveiled not so long ago, and it already looks dated. I just tried it once, and performed an egosearch. Dissatisfied with the results, I decided it wasn’t worth to use it. And what’s about that image thing? Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Oh wait, there was an study comparing the effectiveness of bing vs google for ads; because it has that image, it helps balancing things in the page, I deduct. Very clever, except I don’t see ads (using Adblock) and hence that’s probably why it looked odd to me.

Conclusion: another maneuver for getting traffic and clicks. They don’t care at all about search engines or search quality.

WordPress 2.8

Now let’s have some nice stuff to compensate for the fair amount of ridiculousness above. WordPress 2.8 it’s out and working — I have actually updated the site some minutes ago. So far it seems to be working fine.

The update process was smoother than ever: the one click update process is something every other piece of software on earth should have. More relevant though is the fact that they have improved the Widgets area and specially, the API. I haven’t finished yet (for my tastes) the custom widgets I did for this site, and the new way of handling Widgets (by extending the WP_Widget class, instead of defining tons of functions) looks like it will help a lot for having cleaner and easier to follow code.

I don’t generally use other people’s themes but the ability of installing them right from the admin interface looks very slick. I also heard they were about to merge vanilla WordPress with WordPress MU in a future version; that’s going to be interesting too.

I finally found a use for twitter!

I went to the British Museum on Tuesday and found out that an sculpture that was there in the entrance past October when I last visited was missing. So I wondered where it was, but I needed to find out the name of it. Unfortunately there was no way I could find it searching the museum’s online catalog; even Google image search or Flickr didn’t help at all. In a desperate move, I decided to express my frustration in a tweet. And surprisingly, some minutes after, I got the answer, via another tweet by a member of the Portable Antiquities department at the Museum. I imagine he keeps an eye on tweets containing certain words (such as surprise, surprise… British Museum!), so it’s not like this is psychic science. It’s more like being in a giant chat room where some people keep an eye on certain words only. The Portable Antiquities guys also have a blog, just in case you want to have a look.