Blogging with docutils

I've always liked using reStructuredText to write documents, it seems to fit with my way of thinking, and it is really quick to produce quite a pretty but clean looking document. So far for blogging I've been using Windows Live Writer to compose my posts, and to get the formatting and layout I want I usually have to drop down to HTML view and hack it around a bit, but for this blog I'm using reST along with a slightly hacked front end so that it supports syntax highlighting (no way am I going to do multi-coloured Python code manually). I grabbed the latest docutils from subversion. There seem to be several alternative versions of syntax highlighting in the docutils sandbox (and elsewhere on the web) but not yet a standard one. Eventually I settled on rst2html-highlight.py in the sandbox. Sadly it didn't do exactly what I wanted, so I had to modify it a bit. With the original I can write something like: Now try printing some queries: .. code-block:: pycon >>> q = Person.all() >>> print showQuery(q) Person.all() >>> print showQuery(q.filter("last_name =", "Smith")) Person.all().filter('last_name =', 'Smith') If we have more than one filter, showQuery will always output them in Which gives me: Now try printing some queries: >>> q = Person.all() >>> print showQuery(q) Person.all() >>> print showQuery(q.filter("last_name =", "Smith")) Person.all().filter('last_name =', 'Smith') If we have more than one filter, showQuery will always output them in but I added in the ability to format an included code block: In the code samples which follow the test class is: .. code-block:: python :include: ../Person.py :start-after: from google.appengine.api import users First some setup code for the tests: which results in: In the code samples which follow the test class is: class Person(db.Model): """Dummy class for testing""" first_name = db.StringProperty() last_name = db.StringProperty() city = db.StringProperty() birth_year = db.IntegerProperty() height = db.IntegerProperty() First some setup code for the tests: Ok, I like that: I just wrote 4 slightly different includes to get those examples and absolutely no copy/paste. The highlighting is done using pygments which has a long list of supported languages. It also claims to come with a directive for docutils, but so far as I can see that isn't included in the egg so for now I'll stick with the one in docutils sandbox (of course if I installed docutils from an egg then I wouldn't have that one either). Once I've formatted the document then I cut and paste into Windows Live Writer and upload it to the blog. I updated my blog skin to include the appropriate css in the skin so any changes to formatting will then apply consistently throughout the site. Eventually I might try to shortcut the cut/paste/upload step but for now it gives me an easy way to preview the post in the final skin. You can find the code for all of this at http://code.google.com/p/kupuguy/source/browse/trunk/appengine-doctests