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After four or so years of using wordpress.com for my blog I finally figured out how to highlight code (prettify) in a blog post.
A thank you to @jasonclevine who sent me message on twitter on how to do this.
All you need to do is wrap your code with
There are a bunch of different languages supported and other options which can be defined. You can find all the details here: http://en.support.wordpress.com/code/posting-source-code/
I ran into a styling issue last night and it is driving me nuts. I have found a work-around, but I want to see if I can figure out how to do this way.
I have a span tag which I am using for a button. This button calls a JavaScript function to test blog posting settings. I am using a span because it was easy enough to style.
CSS:
#VerifyBlogClick {
/*#696969*/
color:#575757;
border:1px solid gray;
background-color:#eee;
padding:2px 5px 2px 5px;
margin:0 0 0 13px;
border-radius: 2px;
}
#VerifyBlogClick:hover {
color:Black;
background-color:#bbb;
cursor:pointer;
}
.verifierRunning {
padding-right:30px;
background-image:url(ajaxloaderBlue.gif);
background-repeat:no-repeat;
background-position:right;
}
HTML:
<span id="VerifyBlogClick" onclick="javascript:verifyBlog_click()" title="Tries to send an unpublished test post to your blog">Verify Blog</span>
JavaScript:
$('#VerifyBlogClick').addClass('verifierRunning');
// ... stuff
$('#VerifyBlogClick').removeClass('verifierRunning');
Basically what I have here is a span styled like a button. When the button is clicked I add the class .verifierRunning to the span tag using jquery. This class changes border-right to 20px and defines a background image (a loading image).
The problem that I am running into is that any properties defined in the id selector are not overridden by the class. It seems that id’s always have a higher precedence than a class. I can’t believe that there isn’t a way around this, though I have not been able to find anything on the web which will work.
My work-around this is to change VerifyBlogClick to a class. I don’t mind doing this, I would just like to find out a way to do this the other way.
I just took the long silly way around to return a json result to a page. I kept trying to send a json string back as just that, a string and it just wouldn’t work. Whenever JavaScript received the string it didn’t know what to do with it, except treat it as a string of course. I banged my head against this one for too many hours. Though my persistence payed off.
As the night got later (I think it’s 03:00 about now) I decided to figure out how others are returning json object from ASP.NET MVC. It isn’t as simple as it should be, but not too difficult. The biggest issue, as with much in MVC land is the huge lack of documentation. So looking up something like JsonResult, yields a pretty useless help page. So more time had to go into discovering on how to actually use this cool new result type.
It turns out you can set up and action with a return type of JsonResult (it’s usually ActionResult) and have that action return a json object. I am not even going to pretend I can do this from other objects like json.net (from James Newton-King). I am using this to return a model as json which populates my form with on-demand instructions. This library rocks, but I digress.
The basic structure I used is a dictionary object
public JsonResult MyAction()
{
Dictionary<string, string> dict = new Dictionary<string, string>();
dict.Add("keya", "valuea");
dict.Add("keyb", "valueb");
return Json(dict);
}
That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. Json() is a new web helper in MVC3. You can find it at System.Web.Helpers.
I saw one example where you can build an object on the fly, but I couldn’t get it to work. It basically looks like this:
//....
return Json(new {keya = valuea, keyb = valueb};
The dictionary generic works for now. If you know of a better way, please let me know.
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