Last night my wife and I – on one of those once-in-a-blue-moon date nights – went to a great concert at the Mississippi Studios in North Portland. The opening acts were TERRIBLE – especially the ‘performance artist’, which was a complete trainwreck. We’re talking screeches, weird jerking kind of dances, losing her notes and shuffling through papers on the floor, and these long awkward pauses. But, Catherine Feeny was TERRIFIC. I was so impressed that she was able to do so much with a two-person group. It was a GREAT show! (The fact that the tickets were under $8 made it all the sweeter.)

I’ve been a lazy blogger for a long time – meaning I just copy-and-paste my images into Microsoft Word, and publish. No muss, no fuss, and the tool doesn’t get in the way. The issue is, my code snippets don’t surface properly. Images can’t be googled and are evil for code; the hoster I’m using (sadly) doesn’t like a <scripts> tag or anything beyond plain vanilla HTML. So, what to do?

I set up Live Writer recently and have been experimenting with it, in combination with the PreCode tool at this location. It’s relatively easy to set up – once you’re in you can just click on the “PreCode” snippet on the insert toolbar:

This gives me a nice snippet as below.

 

 

        public void Configuration(IAppBuilder app)
        {
            app.MapSignalR();
            //ConfigureAuth(app);
        }

 

Really all it does is insert a < pre > tag around your HTML like this:

 

Simple, and beautiful. Just like Catherine’s music!

Scott H did a great post on the subject, if you want to get a leg up on the other options available to you…