What is currently out there?

If my memory serves me right, Eston (Bond) of Hyalineskies was one of the earliest to venture into uncharted waters. His “Gridlock” theme did not receive as much attention from the rest of the design community, but users no doubt caught on to it and fondly continue using it to this day.

1. Copy your code (HTML or PHP or whatever else) and paste it in the Postable post area (which at first will read “For your copy-and-pasting pleasure.”).
2. Click the “make me friendly” button
3. The code is converted to characters, for example < will be converted to & l t ;
4. Copy the characters and past it on your blog post or comment within code tags
5. That’s it.

In order to demonstrate how it works, I have copied and pasted a piece of code from one of our latest themes below using Postable conversion:

<?php if (have_posts())  >
<?php $postCount=0; ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post();?>
<?php $postCount++;?>
<div class="entry entry-<?php echo $postCount ;?>">
<h2 class="entry-title"><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
<p class="meta">
Posted <?php the_time('m.d.Y'); ?> at <?php the_time('g:i a') ?> in <?php the_category(', ') ?><?php if (function_exists('the_tags')) { ?><?php the_tags(', ', ', ', ''); ?><?php } ?> received <strong><?php comments_popup_link('Have your say »', '1 Comment »', '% Comments »'); ?></strong>.
</p>

The code is then displayed in a format that can be copied and pasted and never executed. Works fine to me!

Update: Two other tools of significant use are SimpleCode by Dan Cederholm which I have adopted as part of the comment form on this site and elsewhere and the user submitted Asciible converters!