Stefan Koopmanschap has a new post to his site showing the Sculpin users out there how to customize the system for a highlight image and Facebook integration.

Over the past months I've been slowly customizing my Sculpin installation for this blog to fit my own liking a bit more. I've added a bit more styling including a beautiful background image and a transparent white background for the content column. Today I wanted to add a bit more. Two things specifically: I wanted to control a bit more about how my blogposts are displayed when they are shared on Facebook [and] I wanted to have an optional image at the top of blogposts to make them look a bit better.

It turns out this was actually quite easy, so here's a short description of what I did to make it work.

He splits the article into these two parts, showing how to add in custom markup and add custom frontmatter to modify the Facebook posts. He then shows how to add a block to the main templates for the highlight image and a small section to credit the photo back to the original.

In the latest tutorial posted to the SitePoint PHP blog author Wern Ancheta shows you how to integrate your application with the Microsoft Text Analytics API, a service offered by the company putting machine learning to work on things like keyword extraction, topic detection and language detection.

With the explosion of machine learning services in recent years, it has become easier than ever for developers to create “smart apps”. In this article, I’ll introduce you to Microsoft’s offering for providing machine-learning capabilities to apps. Specifically, you’ll learn about the Text Analytics API and build an app to enhance the understanding of online sellers when it comes to their customers.

The tutorial then introduces the Microsoft Cognitive Services API and, more specifically, the Text Analytics API that they'll be hooking the application in to. They walk you through getting an API key for the service, creating an "account" for the application you're working with and deploying it for immediate use. They introduce the functionality of the API with a few "play" examples of each API offered before getting into the creation of their sample application - a tool that reviews the contents of customer feedback, looking for key phrases and returns highlighted versions with what it sees as important.

On the ServerGrove blog today there's a new post showing how you can set up Dreamweaver to be able to edit Twig templates directly, complete with syntax highlighting.

If you are a designer working with Symfony developers you will soon encounter Twig. Twig is a template engine for PHP that has been adopted by Symfony 2, and from a designers perspective, it’s a major improvement over the way things are done in Symfony! For designers who have used templating systems like Smarty before, Twig is going to be a walk in the park, if you have not used a templating system before, Twig is a great place to start.

It's a simple two-step process to get things up and working. You just need to tell Dreamweaver that ".twig" files should be recognized as code and set up the syntax highlighting in the "MMDocumentTypes" XML configuration file (might be a little tricky for non-development types). This change tells the program to open them with HTML syntax highlighting.

According to this new post on the Mayflower blog, the PHP_CodeBrowser PEAR package has finally reached a stable state.

We already wrote about CodeBrowser 0.9 in August and after fixing a few minor bugs the Mayflower Open Source Labs Team is very happy to present PHP_CodeBrowser 1.0.0.

The PHP_CodeBrowser package allows quality assurance tools (like PHPUnit) to create enhanced output including syntax highlighting and colored error sections. It comes with some basic template, CSS, Javascript and image files as well as a plugin system to allow for custom handling of certain error types. You can install it from the pear.phpunit.de PEAR channel or you can check out the source on github.

In the latest post to his blog Thomas Weinert takes a look at a simple challenge someone asked him about - highlighting a section of HTML based on a search string - and his solution.

The challenge is to wrap given words in text content with a span and add a class to the span depending on the word. Do not touch elements, attributes, comments or processing instructions. Do it case insensitive and do it the safe way.

He uses the FluentDOM tool to get the job done. It allows him to create an XPath expression to single out the item to be highlighted (in this case a single or series of words) and wrap them in a matching span tag with the correct styles attached.

If you've given any kind of technical presentation, you know that presenting code samples (clearly) can be one of the larger challenges. Matthew Weier O'Phinney has found a solution that works well for him and his slides - Highlight.

Being a technical presenter, I've often run up against the issue of how to present code snippets. The easiest route is to simply cut-and-paste into your presentation software. However, such code is basically unreadable. [...] The first trick I tried was to take screenshots of gvim. However, this had distinct downsides. [...] The next trick I tried was to use Zend Studio or Eclipse to create my screen shots.

He talks about the tool (Highlight) and its use - basically you specify the input, output and the language it needs to highlight for with more fine-tuning options like font size, line width and more. Compare this and this to the end result of Highlight here to get a feeling for how the product might look.

Maggie Nelson points out a cool way that you TextMate users out there can get better syntax highlighted code for your blog posts.

A coworker, Craig Campbell just launched a new blog recently. One of the really neat things about his blog is how he handles syntax highlighting for code samples - check out examples in his interesting post about Cool Object Building with PHP. In fact, he got so many good comments about this approach that he even wrote a post explaining exactly how he does it: Syntax Highlighting for Your Blog Using TextMate.

Craig's process is as simple as selecting the TextMate bundle and choosing "Create HTML from Document with Line Numbers". The resulting output takes a little tweaking in the HTML and CSS, but the end result is quite nice (and better than several of the syntax highlighting plugins out there).

Scott MacVicar shares a helpful hint for the PHP speakers out there - how to apply syntax highlighting to the code in your slides.

I use Apple's Keynote for doing my presentations and naturally these include some bits of code that need highlighting so that it’s easier to read. [...] In the end I used GESHI which is a highlight library written in PHP that supports the syntax highlighting of around 50 different programming and scripting languages.

He's provided his sample implementation to help you get up and running. You'll need to download and install GESHI to get it working though. Here's an example of the output.

As a part of the release of the new book from Manning Publishing, Zend Framework in Action, Rob Allen has created a new site to act as a companion and to host new Zend Framework-related articles - ZendFrameworkBook.com.

The intention is to highlight interesting things that I see on the Zend Framework mailing lists and also to talk about book stuff periodically as well.

A good bit of the content will be summarized from the Framework's mailing lists but will also include other articles/tutorials/updates on proposals/etc that are happening in that community.

As a part of the release of the new book from Manning Publishing, Zend Framework in Action, Rob Allen has created a new site to act as a companion and to host new Zend Framework-related articles - ZendFrameworkBook.com.

The intention is to highlight interesting things that I see on the Zend Framework mailing lists and also to talk about book stuff periodically as well.

A good bit of the content will be summarized from the Framework's mailing lists but will also include other articles/tutorials/updates on proposals/etc that are happening in that community.