

Posterous adds markdown and syntax highlighting support - rantfoil
http://blog.posterous.com/announcing-markdown-support

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ihodes
Wonderful! Every day, more and more reasons not to build my own blogging
engine.

One wee request? If you've got the inclination, Clojure's a language that's
growing fast and is eminently useful: it might be useful to have a
highlighting mode for it.

Keep up the good work!

~~~
mcav
Second vote for Clojure, though a generic Liap dialect ought to get you
halfway there.

~~~
mahmud
The Lisp syntax-highlight category has been killed by lisppaste:

<http://paste.lisp.org/>

~~~
herdrick
Doesn't do anything for Clojure.

~~~
rantfoil
I've added Clojure support to our CodeRay library -- this should be live in
about an hour or so on our site.

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nex3
I'm surprised they went with CodeRay rather than a more fleshed-out
highlighting library. They only list 20 or so supported languages, whereas
something like Pygments (which Github uses) supports closer to 100.

~~~
twoism
Truth is, I picked CodeRay for two reasons. It's fast and it's pure ruby.
Pygments is great and I spent some time on a version that used it but CodeRay
just fits better within our app. It's pure ruby, supports most languages I
thought we should start with, it's extensible and has a roadmap for things
that I could see our users asking for.

~~~
nex3
From a user's perspective, at least, I would think that language coverage
would trump most other things when considering different highlighters.

~~~
patio11
From a user's perspective, if _your_ language is covered, you don't care about
that guy on the Internets going all nerdrage on you because you do not support
an obscure variant of Cobol with all commands written in romanized Arabic.
Language popularity, like popularity for just about everything else, is a zipf
distribution. Twenty languages probably covers well in excess of 99% of the
people who will actually try to use this.

You can't ever please him, and he's most likely to say "Pah, this isn't
exactly what I want, I'm going to roll my own blog."

(P.S.: the hard bitten product manager in me thinks that, from a user's
perspective, _the user can't program_ and this feature means nothing to her
either way, and every second spent thinking about it is a second the business
never gets back.)

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iamwil
I was about to quit posterous for my technical blogs because of the bad code
posting support, and then they come out with this. It's like they read my
mind, and feedback.

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aidanf
The feature I would really like to see added at Posterous is the ability to
opt out of having affiliate links added to my posts.

I was looking through the user preferences yesterday to see if they had added
this option but couldn't see anything. I was on the verge of moving my blogs
to Posterous when the affiliate link thing came to light. I can't see myself
going back to the service until I can opt out of that.

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NathanKP
Does the syntax highlighting support mixed PHP and HTML? Very few online
syntax highlighters seem to handle this very well, not even gists from github.

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snprbob86
The line numbering behavior is curious. They seems to disappear when I click,
but not if I click-and-drag to select.

Syntax highlighting with line numbers is tricky business. It is very difficult
to get both 1) Perfectly aligned numbers and 2) Support for copy and paste
without numbers.

There must be a decent Javascript solution...

~~~
rantfoil
Yeah, line numbering is tricky. That's why we hide the numbers when you click
-- it's a mode that's built into CodeRay.

Note you can still just paste github gists on their own line and we expand
those too -- so that's still another option.

Also you can probably just hide line numbers completely using CSS if you
customize your theme.

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swombat
A tad slow! I think I requested this a couple of years ago :-P Garry added
some preliminary support back then, but it never worked properly. Good to see
it works better now.

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alecthomas
Thank God! Their editor was horrendous for applying any kind of precise
formatting.

I stopped using Posterous because of it, now I will happily be able to try it
again!

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Judson
I didn't use Posterous because it lacked markdown support. Funny though, that
a little over a year ago, "Gary Tan" (company rep) said the company wanted to
implement this "soon".

[http://getsatisfaction.com/posterous/topics/markdown_or_anot...](http://getsatisfaction.com/posterous/topics/markdown_or_another_simple_markup_in_posterous)

Better late than never, eh?

~~~
tdavis
Posterous was in my YC batch and the first thing I suggested to them was reST
support. They've obviously had bigger fish to fry. Meanwhile, instead of
taking an hour to implement a simple script to process markdown files into
HTML and send them to Posterous, you've chosen to complain that a super-niche
feature was actually released.

~~~
epochwolf
There is no reST library for ruby that I could find.

~~~
tdavis
Yeah, I wouldn't really hold my breath for one, either. The closest anybody
has come as far as I can tell is here: <http://github.com/alphabetum/rbst> and
all that does is wrap docutils' reST processing.

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bradgessler
Cool. When are you guys going to support posting Ruby rack applications? TeX
and PostScript would be a nice addition too.

~~~
twoism
Right after hosted php scripts.

~~~
rantfoil
And hosted coldfusion scripts. =D

~~~
jvyduna
Hmm. "Company Rep" "Garry Tan" said Posterous would support hosted CF scripts
a year ago. Glad to finally hear you're releasing these critical new features.

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mhartl
This was the last thing keeping my tech blog at WordPress. Bravo!

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DCoder
Aw, no assembler highlight. Even nano can do that...

