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Posterous adds markdown and syntax highlighting support

blog.posterous.com

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Re: Posterous adds markdown and syntax highlighting support

#21

Post by tdavis »

Judson wrote: post #18

I didn't use Posterous because it lacked markdown support. Funny though, that a little over a year ago, "Gary Tan" (company rep) said the company wanted to implement this "soon". http://getsatisfaction.com/posterous/topics/markdown_or_anot... Better late than never, eh?

Posterous was in my YC batch and the first thing I suggested to them was reST support. They've obviously had bigger fish to fry. Meanwhile, instead of taking an hour to implement a simple script to process markdown files into HTML and send them to Posterous, you've chosen to complain that a super-niche feature was actually released.

Re: Posterous adds markdown and syntax highlighting support

#22

Post by nex3 »

twoism wrote: post #20
nex3 wrote: post #12

I'm surprised they went with CodeRay rather than a more fleshed-out highlighting library. They only list 20 or so supported languages, whereas something like Pygments (which Github uses) supports closer to 100.

Truth is, I picked CodeRay for two reasons. It's fast and it's pure ruby. Pygments is great and I spent some time on a version that used it but CodeRay just fits better within our app. It's pure ruby, supports most languages I thought we should start with, it's extensible and has a roadmap for things that I could see our users asking for.

From a user's perspective, at least, I would think that language coverage would trump most other things when considering different highlighters.

Re: Posterous adds markdown and syntax highlighting support

#23

Post by speby »

Judson wrote: post #18

I didn't use Posterous because it lacked markdown support. Funny though, that a little over a year ago, "Gary Tan" (company rep) said the company wanted to implement this "soon". http://getsatisfaction.com/posterous/topics/markdown_or_anot... Better late than never, eh?

Yea, really, who cares? The overwhelming majority of people will never use this feature.

Re: Posterous adds markdown and syntax highlighting support

#24

Post by twoism »

nex3 wrote: post #22
twoism wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truth is, I picked CodeRay for two reasons. It's fast and it's pure ruby. Pygments is great and I spent some time on a version that used it but CodeRay just fits better within our app. It's pure ruby, supports most languages I thought we should start with, it's extensible and has a roadmap for things that I could see our users asking for.

From a user's perspective, at least, I would think that language coverage would trump most other things when considering different highlighters.

True. However, working within our architecture and finding a good fit for most use cases was what trumped all else for the feature launch. I like the library we chose and hope it gains traction as a pure ruby highlighting lib but if for some reason it doesn't fit our users needs, we can certainly find a way to accommodate them.

Re: Posterous adds markdown and syntax highlighting support

#26

Post by greyman »

twoism wrote: post #20
nex3 wrote: post #12

I'm surprised they went with CodeRay rather than a more fleshed-out highlighting library. They only list 20 or so supported languages, whereas something like Pygments (which Github uses) supports closer to 100.

Truth is, I picked CodeRay for two reasons. It's fast and it's pure ruby. Pygments is great and I spent some time on a version that used it but CodeRay just fits better within our app. It's pure ruby, supports most languages I thought we should start with, it's extensible and has a roadmap for things that I could see our users asking for.

Nice. Now please allow ads displaying and your service will be perfect.

Re: Posterous adds markdown and syntax highlighting support

#27

Post by jvyduna »

rantfoil wrote: post #6
twoism wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right after hosted php scripts.

And hosted coldfusion scripts. =D

Hmm. "Company Rep" "Garry Tan" said Posterous would support hosted CF scripts a year ago. Glad to finally hear you're releasing these critical new features.

Re: Posterous adds markdown and syntax highlighting support

#28

Post by scorpion032 »

twoism wrote: post #20
nex3 wrote: post #12

I'm surprised they went with CodeRay rather than a more fleshed-out highlighting library. They only list 20 or so supported languages, whereas something like Pygments (which Github uses) supports closer to 100.

Truth is, I picked CodeRay for two reasons. It's fast and it's pure ruby. Pygments is great and I spent some time on a version that used it but CodeRay just fits better within our app. It's pure ruby, supports most languages I thought we should start with, it's extensible and has a roadmap for things that I could see our users asking for.

Why not just slap in the google code highlighter javascript, if the page contains code. http://code.google.com/p/syntaxhighlighter/

Simpler and cleaner that way.

Re: Posterous adds markdown and syntax highlighting support

#30

Post by patio11 »

nex3 wrote: post #22
twoism wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truth is, I picked CodeRay for two reasons. It's fast and it's pure ruby. Pygments is great and I spent some time on a version that used it but CodeRay just fits better within our app. It's pure ruby, supports most languages I thought we should start with, it's extensible and has a roadmap for things that I could see our users asking for.

From a user's perspective, at least, I would think that language coverage would trump most other things when considering different highlighters.

From a user's perspective, if your language is covered, you don't care about that guy on the Internets going all nerdrage on you because you do not support an obscure variant of Cobol with all commands written in romanized Arabic. Language popularity, like popularity for just about everything else, is a zipf distribution. Twenty languages probably covers well in excess of 99% of the people who will actually try to use this.

You can't ever please him, and he's most likely to say "Pah, this isn't exactly what I want, I'm going to roll my own blog."

(P.S.: the hard bitten product manager in me thinks that, from a user's perspective, the user can't program and this feature means nothing to her either way, and every second spent thinking about it is a second the business never gets back.)

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