As this is a free wordpress.com blog, I unfortunately don’t have the ability to edit the CSS of my theme. I tried every single theme offered, even the pink ones, and none of them have adequate support for the <code> tag, in my opinion. I don’t think I’m asking too much: a fixed width font, and horizontal scrolling instead of wrapping.
So I set to work on applying every free theme available and checking out how the code in my first post appeared. Needless to say, I was not happy. Most themes do use a fixed-width font, but none of them offer horizontal scrolling instead of wrapping. The closest I found was a theme called Freshy 1.0. I didn’t dwell on it long (why bother? It doesn’t have horizontal scrolling!) but its author did find a way to number the lines, which is an added bonus. Except that wrapped lines were given a new line number every time they wrap, which is inaccurate.
I’ve noticed that Dave Shuck, who I mentioned in my last post, likes to use codeShare, which has a really nice polish to it – but only archives your submissions for up to 8 weeks, as best I can tell. I hate running into dead links, let alone finding code examples that are no longer available. I can see myself writing a permanently archiving clone of codeShare if I can’t get a theme solution in place.
I’ve offered to modify a few of the free themes to include better support for the tag, so we’ll see where that goes. In the meantime, if anyone is aware of other creative solutions like codeShare that don’t purge your submissions I’m quite interested.
Dave Shuck said
I just wanted to point out that codeShare limits the time of submissions for anonymous users. If you create an account you can set it to unlimited. For our InstantSpot users that use the codeShare api we offer, that is managed that under the covers and by default every share they post is unlimited.
Go check it out. Those guys have done a good job.