New syntax highlighter: PrismJS

Who would have thought that this blog would live long enough to see a third change of syntax highlighter? Incredibly enough, Blogger is also alive and kicking. This site's administration has decided to retire highlightjs, which seems to be still alive, but has lost ground to prismjs. Obviously, it's subjective, but personally I have decided to favor Prism due to the following reasons:

  • It managed to handle VB.NET code blocks better. Yes, I know it's not the most modern language, but we still hold some affection for it.
  • It looks better: it's more compact, with a better color selection. It also highlights more keywords, at least for the languages we use here.
  • It offers an extensible architecture, including a plugin system which allows, for example, adding line numbers. HighlighJS has no such feature.
  • All of these extra features, and still Prism has a very small footprint.

Without further ado, let's jump into the steps for using Prism in Blogger:

  1. In the Blogger dashboard, once the blog to modify has been selected, go to Theme, find the dropdown in the Customize button, and click Edit HTML.
  2. Get CDN links for a specific version of Prism from, for example, cdnjs. Asides from one .css file and one .js file for Prism, I suggest including a .js file for Prism's autoloader plugin. By default, Prism loads support for 6 basic languages. The autoloader plugin detects usages for other languages and automatically loads their definitions. In my case, at the time of writing, the current Prism version was 1.29.0, so I added this to html>head>meta: 
    <link crossorigin='anonymous' href='https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/prism/1.29.0/themes/prism-okaidia.min.css' integrity='sha512-mIs9kKbaw6JZFfSuo+MovjU+Ntggfoj8RwAmJbVXQ5mkAX5LlgETQEweFPI18humSPHymTb5iikEOKWF7I8ncQ==' referrerpolicy='no-referrer' rel='stylesheet'/>
<script crossorigin='anonymous' integrity='sha512-7Z9J3l1+EYfeaPKcGXu3MS/7T+w19WtKQY/n+xzmw4hZhJ9tyYmcUS+4QqAlzhicE5LAfMQSF3iFTK9bQdTxXg==' referrerpolicy='no-referrer' src='https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/prism/1.29.0/prism.min.js'/>
<script crossorigin='anonymous' integrity='sha512-SkmBfuA2hqjzEVpmnMt/LINrjop3GKWqsuLSSB3e7iBmYK7JuWw4ldmmxwD9mdm2IRTTi0OxSAfEGvgEi0i2Kw==' referrerpolicy='no-referrer' src='https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/prism/1.29.0/plugins/autoloader/prism-autoloader.min.js'/>
  3. The only thing that Prism can't do and HighlightJS can is automatic language detection, so the last step is to find all the pre-code blocks and inside the code tag, add the class="language-xxx" attribute. The language prefix is mandatory, per the HTML5 standard. The xxx suffix will indicate which language to use. The list of supported languages is here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

VB.NET: Raise base class events from a derived class

Spanish version / Versión en Español Say we: Have a class we want to divide into subclasses The future base class has events The refactoring leads us to the need of raising an event declared in the base class, from a derived class. When we try to do point 3, we will get a compile error saying that a derived class cannot raise events from a base class. To get around this, we add a protected method in the base class which encapsulates the RaiseEvent call, and call that method from the derived class using MyBase. This way: In the base class (parameters as needed): Protected Overridable Sub OnMessageGenerated(ByVal NewSender As Object, ByVal NewMessage As String) RaiseEvent MessageGenerated(NewSender, New MessageEventArgs(NewMessage)) End Sub And in the derived class: 'Do stuff 'Raise base class event MyBase.OnMessageGenerated( Me, "Message" ) 'Do more stuff... References: Mark Gilbert post
Keep reading

Apache Kafka - I - High level architecture and concepts

Image
Spanish version / Versión en Español First of all, what is Apache Kafka ? An initial definition for it is "a high-throughput distributed messaging system". Breaking this down a bit: High throughput: One of the main goals of Kafka is to process as much messages per unit of time as possible, in a scalable and fault-tolerant way. For example, LinkedIn , which is where Kafka originated, needs to achieve throughputs in the order of 20 million messages per second and 3 GB of data per second. Distributed messaging system: In a generic distributed system , networked computers work together for a common goal. In Kafka's case, that goal is to send data from points A 1 , A 2 , ... A N , to B 1 , B 2 , ... B M . A common benefit of this kind of system, which is crucial to Kafka's success, is horizontal scalability : the ability to handle higher and higher volumes of data by adding nodes to the system (not to be confused with  vertical scalability , whic
Keep reading

Upgrading Lodash from 3.x to 4.x

Spanish version / Versión en Español There are many breaking changes from version 3.x to 4.x; all changes are detailed in the Lodash changelog . There is also a list of deprecated functions , with a regex you can use to detect usages in your code. However, since it is not an exhaustive list, I will list the changes I encountered when performing my own migration, to help anyone undergoing the same process. Direct renames This section includes functions in which only the name changed, i.e. the arguments and return value are the same. 3.x 4.x contains includes first head rest tail invoke invokeMap padLeft padStart padRight padEnd Direct renames if not using thisArg This section includes functions in which the only change is dropping "thisArg". If you are not using it, you can just rename. If you are using thisArg in 3.x, it can be dropped if you are using iteratee to acce
Keep reading