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.
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.
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.
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.)
True. However, working within our architecture and finding a good fit for most use cases was what trumped all else for the feature launch. I like the library we chose and hope it gains traction as a pure ruby highlighting lib but if for some reason it doesn't fit our users needs, we can certainly find a way to accommodate them.
Yeah. Syntax highlighting plugins take effort to write for any highlighting library, so usually a major decision factor is the plugins already available.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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!