Rob Reed, creator of the Ode blogging system has released a new theme for Ode that you can see at his site.

I have a lot "invested" in the current Ode theme, but this looks so good that I really should deploy it on my site.

While I will still be starting most of my microblogging-style (i.e. social-media-style) posts on this site, I will be moving them to my updates site so this site will be a lot less cluttered and feature "full" entries only, for the most part.

Also, the social updates will not be on both sites, also for the most part.

Every couple of days or so, I will move the new social posts from this site to the updates site.

At some point, I will modify my current scripts to post directly to the updates site, and Frugal Technology, Simple Living and Guerrilla Large Appliance Repair will not be flooded with those short entries, which will have a permanent home at Steven Rosenberg's Microblog of Short Posts..

If you want to try the Ode blogging software that powers this site, it comes in two parts. First is the Ode system itself.

There are also a bunch of addins.

Here is what is available from project leader Rob Reed:

• The Ode software (use this to get started)

Addins:

• Disqus (Add comments)
• EditEdit (Create and edit posts with a web form)
• Indexette (Give posts date stamps in metadata instead of using file time)
• Jumper (Add a tag that puts a post preview in the index with a link to the full entry; included in main Ode package)
• Mrkdwn (Use Markdown to simplify the HTML tagging in posts; included in main Ode package)
• Shyposts (Hide some posts from indexes)

Some Ode themes can be found here.

I've been thinking for a while about breaking out my social/microblogging posts and putting them on a separate site mostly because the number of these short entries quickly outpaced the number of "regular" posts.

They're different kinds of content, and I think having them on separate sites works better.

I now have a live microblogging site, also based on Ode, and I'm experimenting on how to tweak the Ode theme(s) to better accommodate what are traditionally considered social posts, meaning they don't have a title and are just a block of short text.

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There is plenty of documentation that comes with the Ode software, but Rob Reed has written a lot more about how the Ode blogging system works.

I first learned about highlight.js while trying out the Go-based Hugo blogging system, where it is a popular choice for adding syntax highlighting to blocks of code displayed on web pages.

Another solution is Pygments, but I didn't want to wade into Python, and a pure JavaScript solution like highlight.js seemed easier all around.

I had already used highlight.js successfully in a couple of Hugo themes, one in which I did the installation myself and another that had it built-in.

So it was only a small leap to do the same on this Ode site.

The instructions are clear (and easy), and the highlight.js developers allow you to create a custom download via check-boxes to include only the languages and markup you want to use on your site. That same page has info on using two separate CDNs (content delivery networks) to deploy highlight.js on your web site, but I opted to create my custom bundle and host it on this site as part of my main Ode theme.

Once you have the Javascript and CSS on your site and are calling it into your web pages, everything between <pre><code> and </code></pre> will benefit from highlight.js' syntax highlighting.

And as you can see, it works.

The only time this kind of syntax highlighting gets problematic is when displaying HTML, where you need to replace < with <, > with > and so on.

Here's a small bit of Ruby so you can see what the syntax highlighting looks like without leaving this post:

Dir.glob("X16*") do |file|
 File.delete(file)
end