I was looking for a way to highlight code in this blog. There appear to be a few ways to go about it. What I like most so far is Google's SyntaxHighlighter. Using nothing but CSS and Javascript, I can make code snippets look good.

For example

C#:

public class SomeClass : SomeBaseClass
{
     public string FirstName {get; set;}
     public string LastName {get; set;}

     public SomeClass(string firstname, string lastname)
     {
         this.FirstName = firstname;
         this.LastName = lastname;
     }

     public string GetFullName()
     {
         return String.Format("{0} {1}", this.FirstName, this.LastName);
     }
}

Python:

class Spam:
    def __init__(self):
        self._state = []

    def eggs(self, arg):
        self._state += arg
end

Ruby:

class SomeRandomClass

  def initialize(hash={})
    #do some initialization with the hash
  end

end

I think that this is pretty slick.

The other cool thing is that I can conditionally control when to include the css and js files. Say I have a collection of posts to display on this page. If none of the posts contains code, why include the additional files?

  #The /posts action
  get '/posts' do
   @posts = Post.all
   #not_empty? is a method I've added to Array/Hash
   @requires_highlighting = @posts.select {|p| p.contains_code?}.not_empty?
   erb :posts
  end

An then in the layout.erb file, I just check for the presence of the @requires_highlighting variable. Simple, but effective

  <% if @requires_highlighting %>
    <%= render_syntax %>
  <% end %>