I just installed a plugin that adds open graph data and a like box to each page on this site. I like to have it configured this way; specifying meta data in the header my pages, it all feels semantic web-ish.

Of course I needed to make some changes in the code to make it all work.

First of all the layout elements in the sidebar weren’t present in the HTML and after a quick inspection of the plugin source code I found that it simply was trying to read that information from a undefined variable $args. Google quickly led me to the widgets API page where I found out it is simply the first parameter passed to that method:

<br />
}<br />
// widget control functions<br />
function kpg_fb_like_data_widget($args) {<br />
 // show the widget<br />
 // need to just put the iframe here<br />

Next up was the description of the page. Because I want all posts to be seperate entities (as opposed to the entire site as one entity) I do not want the description of the page to be the description of the blog. I added a line setting the description simply to the stripped content of the post:

<br />
        global $post;<br />
        if (!empty($post)) {<br />
                $fbtitle=$post->post_title;<br />
                $fbdesc=htmlspecialchars(strip_tags($post->post_content));<br />
        }<br />

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.

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.