I had installed some syntax highlighting plugins before but disabled them because I couldn’t get it to work properly. Now with the pretty new layout all posts with snippets of unhighlighted source code were a real eye-sore, so that needed to be fixed as wel.

For some unknown reason the SyntaxHighlighter Evolved plugin that I couldn’t get to do as I wanted before now works like a charm. The only difficult part was to get me some AppleScript highlighting. David Chambers has written a brush, so I only had to install that brush the proper way. Creating the plugin was easy:

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: SyntaxHighlighter Evolved: AppleScript Brush
Description: Adds support for the Applescript language to the SyntaxHighlighter Evolved plugin.
Author: Ronald Chu
Version: 1.0.0
Author URI: http://www.rchu.nl/
*/

// SyntaxHighlighter Evolved doesn't do anything until early in the "init" hook, so best to wait until after that
add_action( 'init', 'syntaxhighlighter_applescript_regscript' );

// Tell SyntaxHighlighter Evolved about this new language/brush
add_filter( 'syntaxhighlighter_brushes', 'syntaxhighlighter_applescript_addlang' );

// Register the brush file with WordPress
function syntaxhighlighter_applescript_regscript() {
 wp_register_script( 'syntaxhighlighter-brush-applescript', plugins_url( 'shBrushAppleScript.js', __FILE__ ), array('syntaxhighlighter-core'), '1.2.3' );
}

// Filter SyntaxHighlighter Evolved's language array
function syntaxhighlighter_applescript_addlang( $brushes ) {
 $brushes['applescript'] = 'applescript';
 $brushes['osascript'] = 'applescript';

 return $brushes;
}
?>

But at first the highlighting did not work on AppleScript snippets, and it took me quite some time to find out that I shouldn’t have copy-pasted the javascriptcode into Vim on my ssh shell. Some of the special characters in line 37 were transformed into in a question mark which broke the regular expression.

Now, as far as I know, only one thing is wrong; when I refresh quickly in Chrome (5.0.342.7 beta, OS X 10.6.2) some of the keywords do not light up. I do not know if it is a bug in Chome, SyntaxHighighter or the AppleScript brush, but it is something I can live with for now.

PHP Warning:  PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/pdo_mysql.so' - (null) in Unknown on line 0

Following instructions in the comment to remove all architectures but the x86_64 have no effect. I think I have to compile my own PHP installation and have apache use that. Which sucks so much I decided to just wait for Snow Leopard and pray that either pdo_mysql is installed or dynamicly loading libraries is allowed there. I am happy to inform you all that the first is the case. Hurray!

Now as a proud web developer I like to think I can create anything, and thus can write custom software which fits exactly to my personal needs. But as a lazy-ass blogger I don’t want to spend all that time reinventing the wheel, I want everything, and I want it now! Installing Wordpress comes close enough :).

Now I have a way simpler way to write blogposts, and I hope I am going to because it’s fun, and even more fun reading back those posts later (I know this because I am importing old posts into this blog and really enjoy reading and formatting them). I also installed a livejournal crossposter, because the LJ people don’t do RSS or reading other blogs a lot. Lets see what happens.