Over the past week, I've had several people write me asking how I prefer to do syntax highlighting. It's funny that this question cropped up now, just as I changed the way that it's handled on this blog. The way that I used to do it was what I posted to djangosnippets almost a year ago: use a regular expression to parse out <code></code> blocks, highlight the stuff in-between, and spit it back out.
The problem with that method was that that would require some more sophisticated logic now that I'm using RestructuredText to write all of my posts. Unwilling to think any harder than necessary, I did a quick google search, and the second result was exactly what I was looking for: a RestructuredText directive, ready-made by the Pygments people.
The trick is to put this file somewhere on your python path. Then, in the __init__.py of one of the Django apps that will use syntax highlighting, just import the file. It's that simple! (I love RestructuredText.) But it's not only RestructuredText that benefits from this style of plugin. Markdown, too, has a similar plugin--again provided by the Pygments people.
.. sourcecode:: python
print "This is an example of how to use RestructuredText's new directive."
I hope that this answers some of the questions that people had. On a similar note, I'm extremely happy to see that people have been finding the Contact Me link on the right side of the page. Please continue to send me any questions and comments that you have for me!
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