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A big part of this blog is going to be posting code snippets from various languages so I needed to find a way to display code with syntax highlighting in WordPress posts.  Finding a WordPress plugin to display code was a bit overwhelming at first.  There are a lot of plugins out there that display code and do syntax highlighting and it was difficult to know which ones were any good and what versions of WordPress they would work on (some of the last modified dates were over a year ago).  Many of them require disabling the WSIWYG editor, which is annoying.

My searching brought me to this article that listed 12 plugins.  Unfortunately, I didn’t like the look of most of the plugins on the list and the one that I did try (WP-SynHighlight) didn’t work quite right under WordPress 2.8.  At this point I decided to see if I could figure out what StackOverflow uses since I really like the syntax highlighting there.  Turns out that they use Google’s Prettify and there’s a WordPress plugin implemented with it.  That plugin also did not work well under WordPress 2.8 (the posted version is from well over a year ago).

Not to be defeated, I continued my search and found a great article from someone who actually installed and tested 8 syntax highlighting plugins.  I went right to the top of the list and installed Syntax Highlighter Plus.  I installed it and it actually worked!  I’m not thrilled with the styling on the code snippets so I’ll probably tweak it a bit, but it looks solid and it works.

Here’s the list of languages that it supports:

* Bash — `bash`, `sh`
* C++ — `cpp`, `c`, `c++`
* C# — `c#`, `c-sharp`, `csharp`
* CSS — `css`
* Delphi — `delphi`, `pascal`
* Diff — `diff`
* Groovy — `groovy`
* Java — `java`
* JavaScript — `js`, `jscript`, `javascript`
* Perl — `perl`, `pl`
* PHP — `php`
* Plain text — `plain`, `text`
* Python — `py`, `python`
* Ruby — `rb`, `ruby`, `rails`, `ror`
* Scala — `scala`
* SQL — `sql`
* VB — `vb`, `vb.net`

* XML/HTML — `xml`, `html`, `xhtml`, `xslt`

If you are going to use Syntax Highlighter Plus then you’re also going to want to grab Visual Code Editor and this article explains why.  However, if you decide to use Visual Code Editor then you need to use version 0.18 of Syntax Highlighter Plus instead of the latest version.

Firefox addons are implemented using a combination of XUL, Mozilla’s proprietary XML based language, and Javascript.  For anyone who’s done development with HTML and Javascript, learning to write a Firefox addon is pretty straightforward.  All you need is a decent tutorial to get started.  Fortunately, finding tutorials on how to create addons for Firefox is pretty easy.  Some of the ones I found were pretty old, but as far as I could tell the information was still accurate. If you need to learn Javascript, there are plenty of tutorials over on W3Schools.  If you prefer books, I highly recommend David Flanagan’s Javascript: The Definitive Guide.

I decided to start with a tutorial from Mozilla which shows you how to create a classic “Hello World” program by displaying “Hello, World” in the browser’s status bar.   I went through the tutorial quickly and easily by following the exact steps that were outlined in the tutorial.  “Hello, World” showed up my the status bar without  a hitch.  The flaw with this tutorial is that it doesn’t show you how to make the addon actually do something, which is the topic of my next post.

Another useful article I found was this article on Lifehacker that gives some good tips for getting set up to develop Firefox addons.

Last fall I was looking for a way to make some additional income and my wife, whose career currently consists of writing online, pointed me toward eHow.  I’ve never been much of a writer but I thought I’d do ok with writing How-To articles about programming and other computer related topics.  I browsed around the site and found that most of the computer related content was just awful.  Almost all of it was poorly written, out of date, or just completely inaccurate.  I thought to myself “I can do better than this!”.

So in October I created an account and wrote a couple of articles about programming with WPF.  I got distracted with other things for a while the two articles earned next to nothing over the next six months.  In late April I decided to give it another shot and I’ve written 25 more articles since then.  I still haven’t earned much of anything, but from reading the eHow forums I’ve concluded that you really need to reach a critical mass of article count and a certain threshold of article age before you really start seeing any sort of real money.  Even just going from 2 articles to 27 over the course of two months I’ve noticed a significant acceleration in the rate that my earnings are increasing.  Of course, creating this blog has completely stalled my eHow article writing .

eHow writers earn money through some secret earnings algorithm that seems to be primarily based on people clicking ads on your articles.  The official eHow line is that the earnings are based on a variety of factors but the primary driver really seems to be  ad clicks.  Fortunately for me, computer related ads seem to do very well in terms of CPC (cost per click – the rate that advertisers pay for ad clicks).

The previous two paragraphs are background info for the topic of this post – tracking eHow earnings is a royal pain in the butt.  eHow gives you very limited data for your earnings.  For each article in your library, you are shown lifetime views and lifetime earnings.  The only other numbers you get are lifetime views for all articles and total earnings for the month.  This means that you have no way to track article views or earnings over time unless you manually record them every day.  To make matters worse, you can only see data for 10 articles at a time.  For a few days I tried tracking the earnings manually using a Firefox addon called TableTools to copy the earnings data and paste it into Excel.  That just sucked and I was determined to create a better way.

My first thought was to create a Windows application that could make HTTP requests to snag the earnings data since it would involve using technology that I was already familiar with.  I opened up Firebug and watched the HTTP traffic as I logged into eHow and viewed my earnings pages.  I immediately realized that trying to decipher all of the traffic to figure out what requests I’d need to make was going to be a total nightmare.

It then dawned on me that this might be a good thing to implement using a Firefox addon.  From my experience using other Firefox addons, I knew that they were capable of doing everything that I would need it to do.  Perfect!  I would get an opportunity to learn how to write Firefox addons, I would be creating something that I would want to use on a regular basis and something that other people would most certainly want to use.  I was sold – off to learn how to write a Firefox addon!