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I've been using the Movable Type blogging platform from Six Apart to power this site since 2004, and have been very pleased with its stability, simplicity, and extensibility. A feature that I'm only now taking advantage of is support for plug-ins.

Plug-ins extend the capabilities of Movable Type when formatting and associating entries in a site. I've been looking for a plug-in to format Java source code that I occasionally post on my site, since source code can often be difficult to read without language-sensitive formatting.

While browsing the Movable Type plug-in directory, I came across the MT Colorer plug-in. It uses the colorer library for the Perl scripting language to format designated sections within a Movable Type entry. Perl is the language that the Movable Type software is written in, so the MT Colorer plug-in takes advantage of other facilities within Perl to make text formatting simple.

The MT Colorer installation was simple, though I had to download and install the Syntax::Highlight::Universal Perl module that's required. This was possible only because I have shell access to my web hosting provider and know the machine architecture (Linux x86) used by the web servers. People without shell access must request that their hosting provider install the module if it is not already present.

Once the installation was done, I reformatted several of my previous posts and have been pleased with the outcome. As with all Movable Type plug-ins the work is performed at the time of publishing, so all content is rendered up-front. Here's an example, in the form of a simple Hello World! Java class:

public class HelloWorld
{
  public HelloWorld () { }

  public static void main (String [] args)
  {
    System.out.println("Hello, World!");
  }
}