One of the tasks I set for myself with JIRA at Quest was to configure it and Subversion so that people can't check in with referencing a JIRA Issue. This is a little thing, but it helps ensure people will actually use the issue tracker, instead of letting it languish. Add good version and source control policies - the kind you implement on the server, not just the kind you tell people to use (because we all know how well that works out) - and you have a solution that helps people use both version control and the issue tracker sensibly. Read on, intrepid explorer →

Occasionally, I’ll be reading a website and just wish I could use another, better font. I can, of course… I can go look up the element on the page that I want to change, use the developer tools to dynamically alter the page, and go back to my reading. This is a pain in the neck, though, and sometimes I want to use fonts that I don’t necessarily have on my computer – like “Athelas,” the font that Readability uses to display its body text, and which they get using Typekit. Read on, intrepid explorer →

A few months ago I ran across Chip Cullen’s absolutely fantastic ligatures.js – a very simple jQuery function that manually replaces character pairs or triplets with their corresponding unicode ligature. There was just one problem: to use the function, you had to manually test each of the characters you wanted to use against the target font. This is potentially a lot of work, especially if you have multiple custom fonts on your page. Read on, intrepid explorer →