As you may have realized, we use wordpress on our blog. Its simple and easy and nice to use, however it doesnt come without its oddities which can be a pain in the butt for a technical blog.

— being translated into em-dash
When doing firewall scripts or shell scripts you often use the double dash, or –. In wordpress this is nicely translated into a em-dash — windows like dash. I am unsure why, if i had wanted that i surely would have typed that! This breaks any scripts or patches i happen to paste in unless i use the pre tags. The fix is simple, of course, its a mere hack of the code.
Open up wp-includes/formatting.php and go to line 56. It looks like this

$static_characters = array_merge(array('---', ' -- ', '--', ' - ', 'xn–', '...', '``', '\'s', '\'\'', ' (tm)'), $cockney);
$static_replacements = array_merge(array('—', ' — ', '–', ' – ', 'xn--', '…', $opening_quote, '’s', $closing_quote, ' ™'), $cockneyreplace);

Take out the first 4 elements of the array on both lines so it looks like this

 $static_characters = array_merge(array('xn–', '...', '``', '\'s', '\'\'', ' (tm)'), $cockney);
$static_replacements = array_merge(array('xn--', '…', $opening_quote, '’s', $closing_quote, ' ™'), $cockneyreplace);

Formatting/Syntax Highlight

Another formatting problem we had was of course syntax highlighting. I love syntax highlighting! and most of the plugins use GeSHi or similar.

We use the WP-Syntax plugin. This allows us to use <pre lang=’bash’> code and does pretty much most languages.