GitHub Code in WordPress
I like to include my source code in my WordPress posts, but it was getting annoying to keep up-to-date. Every time I’d make a change to my code and commit it to GitHub, I’d have to dig through WordPress to find the old post, duplicate my changes there, and republish. That’s entirely too manual for me. I needed a better solution.
A little digging around on GitHub itself paid off. I ran across a project called GitHub Code Viewer written by Steve Francia. (He’s the creator of spf13-vim, the totally amazing vim profile.)
GitHub Code Viewer is a WordPress plugin that allows you to grab your source code directly from GitHub and display it in a post. It was perfect! The code, unfortunately, didn’t work right with the latest WordPress release. I was sad. (sadface)
I had some free time that day, thankfully, and took it upon myself to fix the code up myself. It was my very first time forking a git repository, or doing a pull request, or any of those fun group-git things. It was very exciting. The end result is a working WordPress plugin that lets me pull in code from my repository.
I already use a wonderful syntax highlighter called SyntaxHighlighter Evolved. Together with GitHub Code Viewer I can include all of my source directly in my posts, have it look pretty, and be automatically updated.
Now, in an experiment of hilarious recursion, you will find below the code to GitHub Code Viewer displayed in my blog via GitHub Code Viewer. But before that, I’ll ALSO show you the code to use GitHub Code Viewer to display GitHub Code Viewer. (Takes a bow).