I've spent a little time recently on the custom theme for this blog (Please check it out and let me know what you think), and I've been coming to a conclusion I've had before with software. Keep it self contained.
If you work on a team, it's very helpful if a new dev or a dev new to the project can simply check out the source and go. No install this or register that. Just open the solution in the IDE and compile & run.
It makes sense to me that the same should be true of a blog post. I started using extensions for BlogEngine.Net for embedding Youtube videos, and highlighting code syntax. The problem with this has become evident with my efforts to make a custom theme. Check out this example using the new theme. The font is wrong, but moreover the code formatting is completely missing. This is because of the code formatter extension I used for BlogEngine.Net. The new css combine with the problem the extension has with the new layout render it useless.
Additionally, if I were to move to a different blog platform, my posts would suffer the same problem because the extension presumably won't exist on that platform. I'm reluctently concluding I should use Windows Live Writer to compose posts. I like portability, and LiveWriter takes a little bit of that away. But at least I could make my posts look right even when I change themes.
So my question is, do I try to get the old code formatted right or just skip it and move forward?
-j