I recently asked the programming community what were the best options for highlighting code snippets in blog posts. A lot of good answers came back and I settled on using SyntaxHighlighter.

There’s a handy plugin for Wordpress users, though be sure to use the HTML editor and not the Visual/WYSIWYG editor otherwise the name attribute will be stripped from the <pre> tag.

Here’s an example of some Ruby code to show you SyntaxHighlighter in action. This code is, taken from the upcoming AuroraCMS v2.0 – stay tuned for more news on this product in the coming weeks.

def force_login
  if params[:controller] != 'session'
    redirect_to login_path unless logged_in
  end
end

def force_logout(message = 'You have been logged out.')
  self.current_user.forget_me if logged_in?
  cookies.delete :auth_token
  reset_session
  flash[:notice] = message
  redirect_to login_path
end

Previously I’ve used vim’s :TOhtml command to export syntax-highlighted code snippets, but I think this is a much nicer alternative. It also means that we’ll have consistent highlighting across all of our posts regardless of individual poster’s preferences or .vimrc.