I love reading other people's blogs. I love reading code in other peoples blogs. I especially love reading code in Scott Hanselman's blog because he routinely finds interesting code that makes us all just a little bit smarter after we read it. Avid bloggers like ScottH and Jeff and ScottGu are very particular about their article formats and display layouts... and this is a good thing. The visual presentation of an article is as important to readability as is writing style and information.

But all the nifty CSS and HTML layout tricks fall flat on their face when your audience uses a feed aggregator to read your stuff. Personally, I'm a Google advocate and use Google Reader. It's a great way to get all your stuff in one place, in one interface, tagged together in one cloud. Very useful for managing the internet firehose that is spewing gigagallons of information at you on any given day.

But Google Reader (and others) tend to be rather limited in the way they render complex visual layout... oh, say, like syntax-highlighted source code. Doh!

Here's a couple of examples (click the pictures to see larger versions):

Scott Hanselman's blog is probably the most egregious offender. While his blog site displays the syntax-highlighted code nicely is tan blocks...

... Google Reader takes all this code text, strips all color formatting and renders it on a single line. Utterly useless.

ScottGu solves this problem by embedding raster images of source code in his articles. Very readable on both his site...

... and in Google Reader.

But it is so very NOT useful when I want to copy code from his articles.

K. Scott Allen seems to have found the correct balance. He manages to keep both his site's view...

... and Google's view in fairly close agreement, and I can still plagiarize when I want to :)