new blog, RedCloth and CodeRay

19 Mar 2009 13:05

I’ve decided to go back to writing my own blog software. Simply Mephisto is too much for my needs and playing around with building my own Mephisto plugin just to create a plain old boring static page is just too time consuming. In fact I was able to knock up a new blog in less time.

My main issue with writing my own blog the last time was getting RedCloth to play nicely with CodeRay. Fortunately I stumbled upon the solution on GitHub.

http://github.com/leethal/redcloth-with-coderay/tree/master

It wasn’t quite what I wanted but gave me a good start and a few modifications later we have.

“./config/initializers/redcloth_with_coderay.rb”

module RedclothWithCoderay
  
  SOURCE_TAG_REGEXP = /(<pre><code>(.+?)<\/source>)/m

  # The RedCloth extension that performs the syntax highlighting.
  def refs_syntax_highlighter(text)
    text.gsub!(SOURCE_TAG_REGEXP) do |m|
  
      all_of_it = $~[0]
      lang = ($~[2] || :ruby).to_sym
      code = $~[3].strip

      highlighted = CodeRay.scan(code, lang).html(:wrap => :div, :css => :class, :line_numbers => :inline)

      "<notextile>#{highlighted}</notextile>"
    end
  end

end

RedCloth.class_eval { include RedclothWithCoderay }

“./app/helpers/application_helper.rb”

module ApplicationHelper
  def textilize(text)
    RedCloth.new(text).to_html(:textile, :refs_syntax_highlighter)
  end
end

Typically after getting this to work adding text after any code block was susequently hampered by a bug in RedCloth-4.1.9 which had me stumped for a whole day. I have reverted to RedCloth-4.1.1 in the meantime and its all lovely again.

http://jgarber.lighthouseapp.com/projects/13054/tickets/119-notextile-blocks-included-in-following-paragrap

So woo, it works and there be joy abound. Now to import all my old blog entries and fiddle with the code highlighting to make them work super great.