code samples in blogger are a pain

I can’t say I enjoy writing in the blogger post interface, in fact it’s pretty frustrating. For a while there I was using google docs to write posts(which I loved), then I would just publish to my blog. That actually worked great until the actual publishing process which doesn’t allow you to control the title very effectively and totally messed up my rss feed even if I did fix the title. Then I tried scribefire which again was really promising but it’s a cramped UI and again the publishing process was really clunky for my workflow. (things remain drafts for me for weeks at a time)

Anyway, I’m looking at my last post and those code samples are embarrassingly poorly formatted. Not only that but if you check the source the blogger editor is introducing tons of html space entities which drives me nuts considering I’m using whitespace:pre on my blockquotes anyway.

I’m really inclined to just use the tools I have when it comes to this site, primarily so that I focus on writing and not tinkering. Since moving my website from a hosted environment to blogger I have actually started to focus again on my writing and my projects rather than tinkering with a wheel that’s been built a thousand times (photo gallery scripts, php and perl cgi trickery for mundane templating etc). So while I will probably end up spending time on this at some point I really just want to find something that “just works” for showing code in blog posts. More to come I’m sure.