Want a good, free, open-source font for writing code with? Try Bistream Vera Sans Mono.

Here is how I set up my web development workflow. As this first figure illustrate, you start with an initial Subversion (or CVS) repository. You then checkout (1) a working copy of the repository to any development severs you want to work on as well as the production server.

You then proceed to make changes and develop your site. When you want to share your changes with the rest of the other developers (or if you want to get ready to push the site to production) proceed as follows. In the second figure, step (2) is where you update your local copy. This will make sure the files you are working with are as current as possible. After you update, you can then commit (3) the changes. Committing will upload your changes to the repository. Continue repeating steps (2) and (3) throughout the site development and maintenance.

Whenever you wish to push a version of the site to the production server, you can run an update command and freshen the files.

The Process

If you run emacs on Windows, there are a number of customizations available to our Unix counterparts via their .Xdefaults file. We have access to these same customizations, however we manipulate them via the Windows Registry.

1. Start regedit. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\GNU\Emacs (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\GNU\Emacs to make changes for all users). Create “Keys” (folders) as necessary.
2. Add a “String Value”. Name it Emacs.x; where x is one of:

   background, bitmapIcon, borderColor, borderWidth, cursorColor, font, foreground, geometry, iconName, internalBorder, lineSpacing, menuBar, toolBar, minibuffer, paneFont, pointerColor, reverseVideo, screenGamma, selectionFont, synchronous, title, verticalScrollBars.

My preferences

1. Emacs.reverseVideo = On
2. Emacs.font = -outline-Bitstream Vera Sans Mono-normal-r-normal-normal-12-90-96-96-c-*-iso8859-1


1. Switches to light on dark background (which is default console behavior).
2. Changes the font to a more readable mono-spaced font.

Hi, I’m SkierX, also known as Josh King. I’ve been using this alias online for about a decade now. The name initially was a derivative of RacerX from Speed Racer. I was into skiing, so I adopted SkierX. The first place I used it was an online game called SubSpace. I think ex-skier would be more appropriate now because I rarely get to go skiing anymore. For as long as I’ve been using this name, people have been mispronouncing it as sky-er instead of skee-er.