Roberto Guido

laravel

Parametric Interface

I want to share the following recent experience for a little proud. In GASdotto - my main open source project - I heavily use Larastrap, my own library of Bootstrap5 components for Laravel Blade. Actually, Larastrap has been implemented in the first instance as a derivation of GASdotto's internals. Among

hack

The Wikipedia Graph

I've spent the latest days playing around categories in Italian Wikipedia, in the aim to chart them and get a visualization of a semantic graph composed by more than 440K nodes. I've not reached any acceptable nor useful result, but it is worth to document what actually worked and what

laravel

Little Small Laravel Components

Tonight I had the good idea to profile (using this package, really suggested) Larastrap, my heavily opinionated library of Bootstrap components for Laravel. And I was surprised to find that most of the time was wasted in Illuminate\View\FileViewFinder::findInPaths() function. With a bit of investigation I landed on

laravel

Laravel Catch All Relationship

Sometimes you want a "catch all" relationship in your Laravel model. The most common case is the "admin" User able to access all entities of a given other model, with no explicit belongsToMany or hasMany relationships described in the database, while other Users can access only assigned entities. Of course

laravel

Lazy Tagging Outgoing Email

I used to send my transactional email using AWS SES, but more recently - due some annoying problem with the access to AWS - I moved away to land on SendInBlue. Good service, based in Europe (GDPR FTW!), already integrated with the Symfony Mailer - and, by extension, with Laravel.

bootstrap

Fixing Vite + Bootstrap + jQuery

At some point within the version 9 release cycle, Laravel assets' bundling process has been migrated to Vite: yet another bundler introducing breaks and incompatibilities with many JS packages, just for the sake of the Javascript Fatigue. Among the breaks introduced by Vite, the major one affecting my usual JS

Introducing: Semantic Builders

Let say it: Wikidata is super cool. A giant knowledge graph containing lots of informations about people, history, geography, all accessible through a query interface. I use it quite often to retrieve data not accessible anywhere else (here an example), and would like to use it even more often both

laravel

Override Sorting in Eloquent

A very peculiar use case: in a Laravel application, within a complex flow of encapsulated functions which builds different types of Eloquent queries, I always have to orderBy() the created_at timestamp. Except in one situation. The proper way to fix should be to pass a extra parameter to handle

wikidata

Wikidata Logging Wall

I'm trying to setup my own Wikidata endpoint, for fun and profit. It requires lots of resources (do not even try without at least two SSD disks in RAID 0...), but the tools are easily accessible, mostly documented, and there are a few script ready to be executed. There are

javascript

Slide to Paginate

An underrated issue with web pagination is the amount of accessible pages: when dozens are available, the selector becomes too large (and unusable on mobile) or incomplete (as not all pages are rappresented and selectable; sometime, just the previous and the next pages are available). So I tried to replace

bootstrap

Are You Sure?

All we know the confirmation dialog boxes to be prompted to the user - e.g. on deletion actions - and for my Laravel applications I've consolidated an approach a bit more articulated then the classic (and ugly, and poorly informative) confirm('Are you sure?') attached to some submit

laravel

Polymorphic, More or Less

An existing Laravel codebase, quite good but with a low level of abstraction, an a feature already existing for a given context (dates of availability for X) to replicate to another context (dates of availability for Y). At first, a polymorphic relationship would have been the solution to abstract the

laravel

Squeezing JS

I'm working on a website with hard requirements in SEO and performance, so I have to cut millisecond after millisecond to reduce the "Web Vitals" parameters (and in particular the so-called "Largest Contentful Paint"). And I've entered the magical world of automated tools for CSS optimization. Two are the most

laravel

Scroll and Fall

Working on browser unit test with Laravel Dusk I've been hunted for many days on a specific error: "element click intercepted". This is generated in two situations: when "Element FOOBAR is not clickable at point (X, Y). Other element would receive the click" it means that the desired element is

laravel

Talking with the Unit Tests

I had the very bad idea to try browser testing, writing some code on top of Laravel Dusk for an application of mine. Apart the quantity of time wasted to instrument the test for every action (scroll a little down to reach the Save button, add some artifical pause to

laravel

Introducing: Larastrap

At least one year ago I realized that my main open source project (GASdotto: a management application for Purchasing Groups built with Laravel) was stuck on Bootstrap 3, while Bootstrap 4 was been around for a while and Bootstrap 5 was already been announced. So I wanted to upgrade the

css

Boostrap Custom Display

Trying to format a Bootstrap table for decent display on mobile screens, I wanted to hide the thead element below a certain breakpoint. I used the d-none d-md-block combo, then I realized that normally a thead should be in display: table-header-group. And there is no d-table-header-group rule in Bootstrap... I

php

The Ultimate Data Source

"Ehi! Two years ago many municipalities in Italy have been suppressed, created and merged! I need to update the database for a customer of mine, who didn't found one of them! Let's look for an updated CSV!" And, of course, I found nothing. At least nothing usable in my own

laravel

Cutting Eloquent Models with Blade

If you already tried to do something with Blade Components in Laravel, probably you already stumbled upon the many limitations of the subsystems. Among the many, the latest - and most disappointing - I've found is that seems not possible to pass an Eloquent instance as attribute to a component:

laravel

Lazy Async Jobs

UPDATE: I've just published a package on Packagist to manage Asyncronous Jobs over HTTP requests. I have a Laravel application sendings a lot of mail notifications when certain operations are done, so I wanted to delegate mail sending to a Queue to avoid to the users long waits for the

laravel

Dynamic Global Scope

I have an application which usually handles, on the same instance, different groups of informations isolated by context: each user is assigned to one of the contexts, many users act inside the same context, when a user logs in all the managed data are relative to his own context. This

hack

PeerTube Direct Links

A note for future self: as the web interface of PeerTube do not exposes any direct link to access the raw video files it hosts (but only a link to the embeddable own player, which may be unconvenient in many situations), a bit of hack is required. Given that a

hack

Pushing into the Rocket

A Rocket Chat instance, the same 60 users already pushed into a PeerTube instance, and poor will to understand the too much complex native feature to import by CSV. Let's write another script (very similar to the PeerTube's one...):

hack

Pushing into the Tube

A PeerTube instance, 60 users to create, and an import feature not yet implemented. But a suggestion: "You can easily develop a script that create these users via API call". Here, my script:

laravel

Laravel Infinite Scroll

I needed to quickly implement a very simple infinite scroll behaviour on a very simple page. Due laziness I got a look for any dirty hack suggested by random people on the internet to do that in Laravel, ready to be copied and pasted; I found a method using jScroll