What is Textile and GeSHi?

Textile

To quote Wikipedia,

"Textile is a lightweight markup language originally developed by Dean Allen and billed as a "humane Web text generator". Textile converts its marked-up text input to valid, well-formed XHTML and also inserts character entity references for apostrophes, opening and closing single and double quotation marks, ellipses and em dashes."

Simply put, Textile will take input that looks like this:

h1. I am a header
 
_italics_ *bold*. How _cool_ is *this*?
 
# first
# second
# third

and transform it into

Here is a full reference for all the neat things the Textile can do. Once you get used to the syntax of Textile, you can create articles in no time without using bloated JavaScript based HTML editors.

GeSHi

GeSHi is a very good syntax highlighter, it supports a lot of languages, the full list of supported languages is available at it's homepage.

If you want to post code snippets on your web page, then GeSHi is something you should have. It makes code very easy to understand, and more importantly, good to look at :).

Let's seen an example of what GeSHi can do:

// Simple code example 
 
$foo = rand(0, 99);
if ( $foo > 50 )
{
  echo "That's a big number";
}
elseif ( $foo > 20 )
{
  print("That number is pretty average...");
}
else
{
  printf("That number %s", "is TINY!");
}