blog.humaneguitarist.org

Thankfully, pretty much nobody reads this blog.

If they did, they'd have seen a lot of weird changes going on in real-time concerning some XML code in a recent post.

Basically, I've been playing around with various WordPress plugins that support syntax highlighting, which is a fancy way of color-coding code examples with color-coding specific to various scripting and markup languages like PHP, Python, XML, etc.

Anyway, after playing around with several, I was running into the same issue with the indent stripping as talked about here. The use of indentation is paramount to making one's code readable and in some languages, like Python, indentation is required.

In other words, this is valid Python code:

if a == a:

print "The 'a' variable is equal to itself!"

But this is invalid:

if a == a:

print "The 'a' variable is equal to itself!"

because the print statement is dependent on a condition.

Anyway, what was happening was that I'd put code into WordPress, the indentation and highlighting would look good, but if I wanted to edit my post later all the indentation would be lost when I'd reopened the post in the editor (btw: I use Dean's FCKEditor).

So here's what appears to fix it:

• I installed my preferred WordPress syntax highlighter: Syntax Highlighter Compress Syntax Highlighter Evolved.
• I wrote my post and pasted my code directly into the Visual Editor.
• I then highlighted only the code and from the Visual Editor's "styles" drop-down menu I chose "Computer Code".
• I then edited the post in Source mode.
  • The indentations had now been converted to the proper HTML entity names.
• I replaced the <code> tags with <pre> tags.
  • The opening <pre> tag needs a "class" attribute to specify the type of code (i.e. Python, XML, etc.)
  • For example, I'd use this for Python:
    • <pre class="brush:python">
  • and this for XML:
    • <pre class="brush:xml">

From then on, everything seems to be OK. That is to say, I can edit my post at a later time with the Source or Visual Editor and all my indentations are intact.

Here's the earlier Python code using the technique just described:

if a == a:
	    print "The 'a' variable is equal to itself!"

And that's that … I hope.

I haven't played around with this yet but in the latest newsletter by the Noteflight crew, it seems they've added score integration into Wordpress blogs (like this one):

If you're hosting your own WordPress site, Noteflight integrates with WordPress in a couple of exciting ways. First, we now support single-signon between WordPress and Noteflight Learning Edition. This means you can set up a Learning Edition community with Noteflight, and let every user on your WordPress site seamlessly access a matching account on Learning Edition without ever needing to sign in separately. All your WordPress users will also be able to see scores shared within that community. Second, Noteflight supports a nifty standard called OEmbed, that allows you to simply paste a Noteflight score link into WordPress and have the embedded score appear as if by magic. (You have to configure your WordPress site to tell it that this is OK.)

When I test this out, I'll post on this topic again. But for now I really just needed to put this on my blog to have a record of this news, given that I'd already forgotten that it was in my email box.