Luke, Future of Web Typography
For years typography on the web has been very limited when compared to what can be in the print world. Over the last few years though we have been given more and more tools to help us accomplish good typography on the web. As time goes on these tools will get better and will become more widely supported. There was an article on Smashing Magazine this week that talked about a lot of these tools that are available to web designers. I really enjoyed reading up, refreshing my memory of code I haven’t used in a while, and also learning some new ways of styling type. Read it over, the text on your website will be very happy you did.

Benjam, 20 Helpful jQuery Methods You Should Be Using
While developing a website, I use a lot of tools, both in the creation of the website files (my text editor of choice, file manager, etc.), and within the website itself (CakePHP, jQuery, CSS, etc.), and I’m always interested in finding features of those tools that I might not be very familiar with.  While I have a deep familiarity with the features I use regularly, and a passing familiarity with most of the features of these tools, it’s always good to get a refresher on what I could be using more.  Here is a post highlighting 20 jQuery methods/features (actually 33 methods in 20 groups) that should be in everybody’s familiarity tool box.

Mac, April Fools – PHP Style
This discusses a topic that we often only think about once or twice a year, but it is still worthy of our attention and deserves some practice to improve our skills. Also, while you are there, subscribe to the PHP Developers feed. The main guy, Chris Cornutt, does an excellent job of filtering the best PHP articles.

Digital typography has come a long way in the last decade, and a wide array of monospaced beauties are now available for our coding pleasure. But what’s the best font choice when it comes to code? What about size? What about color? I think a lot of these decisions come down to personal preference, but one thing’s for sure, when you’re staring at a screen for hours on end, readability is paramount.

After a dark age of experimentation with WYSIWYG editors in the early 2000′s, I began to return to my coding roots. Sometime around 2003, I made the switch to Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver was the first editor I had used that took advantage of syntax coloring. The ability to recognize elements greatly increased scannability, and helped keep me in line while trying to write valid code.

Some CSS syntax styling with Dreamweaver

At the time, I was using 9pt Monaco. The 9pt size was the default setting, and I must have just gotten used to it, because I left it like that for several years. That all changed when I noticed some of my coworkers beginning to use a program called TextMate.

The theme that seduced me away from Dreamweaver was called Black Pearl. The light and mid-toned colors on the dark background had so much more contrast than the stark white I was used to. Colors aside, I noticed the font was much larger (12pt Monaco) and employed a beautifully rendered anti-alias.

I am now myself a proud owner of TextMate, and am loving the Blackboard theme. Tim and Luke both use the same theme, so this makes it easy to recognize syntax when we’re helping each other with code.

A slice of 12pt Monaco from TextMate's Blackboard theme

But to each his own! I almost decided to use Coda for the sheer sake of adding ‘Panic Sans’ to my font library. Here are a few more runners up in my book:

• Andale Mono
• Consolas
• Bitstream Vera Sans Mono (Panic Sans’ parent)
• Lucida Console

What’s your favorite coding font?