Tag: Web

Harry Roberts—architecting scalable CSS

Harry Roberts is a front-end architect specialising in CSS. I’ve learned a lot from his thinking and writing over the years, not least his excellent CSS guidelines.

This is a video that I’ve been meaning to watch for ages, so found the time yesterday to view it. It’s very good, very thought-provoking, very practical.

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This afternoon I moved my blog from the subdomain blog.garethjmsaunders.co.uk to become my main website here at www.garethjmsaunders.co.uk.

If you are subscribing to my blog then please update the RSS feed to https://www.garethjmsaunders.co.uk/feed/.

In the meantime, I’ve got a redirect in place to forward all traffic to the new location.

It’s something that I’ve wanted to do for a while as my main website wasn’t really offering anything more than I already had on my blog. I also wanted to simplify things significantly ahead of another web host move.

Where The Guardian advertises developer jobs

Screenshot of code from The Guardian website with WE ARE HIRING written in ASCII art
Screenshot of code from The Guardian website with WE ARE HIRING written in ASCII art

This evening I was reading an article by Giles Fraser on The Guardian website and I was intrigued to understand how they coded the drop-cap at the top of the article:

Screenshot of dropped cap
.drop-cap > .drop-cap__inner

So being versed in the ways of the web developer I highlighted the letter, right-clicked and selected Inspect (I’m using Google Chrome, other browsers are also available). This opens a code inspector where you can poke around the HTML, CSS and JavaScript that builds a webpage, and it even allows you to edit it in situ to better understand how it all fits together.

I smiled when I saw, at the top of the HTML code, written in a comment in a combination of text and ASCII art:

WE ARE HIRING

WE ARE HIRING

Ever thought about joining us?
http://developers.theguardian.com/join-the-team.html

What a terrific idea! Brilliant targeted advertising.

 

XAMPP Apache won’t start on Windows 10 — a fix

At work yesterday I discovered that the localhost Apache web server on my PC wouldn’t start; it was running XAMPP.

Each time I tried to start Apache from the XAMPP control panel I got these error messages in the console:

08:59:34 [Apache] Attempting to start Apache app…
08:59:35 [Apache] Status change detected: running
08:59:35 [Apache] Status change detected: stopped
08:59:35 [Apache] Error: Apache shutdown unexpectedly.
08:59:35 [Apache] This may be due to a blocked port, missing dependencies,
08:59:35 [Apache] improper privileges, a crash, or a shutdown by another method.
08:59:35 [Apache] Press the Logs button to view error logs and check
08:59:35 [Apache] the Windows Event Viewer for more clues
08:59:35 [Apache] If you need more help, copy and post this
08:59:35 [Apache] entire log window on the forums

Fix

Reinstalling XAMPP didn’t fix the issue. But this did, spotted on the ever-wonderful Stackoverflow:

  1. Press Windows + R to bring up the Windows Run… dialog.
  2. Type services.msc and click OK.
  3. Scroll down the list of services to find World Wide Web Publishing Service.
  4. Right-click it and select Properties.
  5. Change the Startup type to Manual.
  6. Click Stop and wait for the service to stop.
  7. Click OK.

World Wide Web Publishing Service properties dialog
This is the naughty culprit

That fixed it. Now Apache is running, as evidenced by the green light on the XAMPP control panel:

XAMPP Control Panel
Both Apache httpd and MySQL are running