hack

A collection of 39 posts

hack

Distorting the Web

Today I had to deal with a customization involving the change of the canonical link in some pages of a website, under certain conditions, due SEO requirements. The problem: the code of the website could not be modified, as it runs as a binary application quite difficult to modify and

larastrap

Reading Back a Template

In the last month I started to massively review the internals of Larastrap, in the aim to deliver a 1.0 release within the next weeks (just in time to celebrate the first 5000 downloads from Packagist). And I've began to implement a bizarre idea. In the usual

javascript

Acrobatic Chart Labels

The web designer of a client of mine has been bold enough to design a multiline, multistyle label for the legend of a chart. And, as charts (and legends) are generated using a commodity JS library, the issue has been to enforce such hardy design. Luckily for me, the JS

javascript

Touch to Zoom

Working on a Linux t-shirts e-commerce, I added a simple "hover-to-zoom" feature on the main image displayed in each product's page (this one, for example): it is possible to just hover the mouse cursor to obtain a larger image, which moves accordingly to the mouse movements.

hack

Playing with Semantic SEO

I'm building a tool for Wikipedia trends analisys, and in the latest days I've introduced a feature intended - first of all - to myself. Here and there I've read about "Semantic SEO", which can be summarized in "Provide a semantic

fediverse

Automate Mobilizon

As I'm hacking a Mobilizon instance to push into the fediverse events fetched from different sources (e.g. the ticket selling platoforms popular in Italy, like VivaTicket), I have to put together some PHP script to automatically interact with the poorly documented Mobilizon API. Even for the first

hack

Happiest Birthdays

On TrendingOnWiki there is a set of pages dedicated to the most relevant birthdays for each day, where "most relevant" is determined by the number of mentions each person has on Wikipedia. Those informations are extracted from Wikidata - more exactly from Semantic Builders, previously mentioned here, as

php

Face to Face

Finally, I've found at least one actual use for an AI-powered tool. Even if this particular use case is absolutely not a new one. On TrendingOnWiki - a website monitoring trending topics on Wikipedia - I use images took from Commons to enhance pages. Usually photos of people.

larastrap

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

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

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

wikidata

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.

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

larastrap

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

fediverse

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

fediverse

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...): <?php require_once('vendor/autoload.

fediverse

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: <?php require_once('vendor/autoload.php'); use GuzzleHttp\Client; $endpoint = 'https:

php

Scaling Websockets in PHP

I have to implement some kind of sub-system for a larger platform, able to handle realtime communications (such as chat, notifications, and a few other things). And this means: websockets. And, as the platform itself is implemented in PHP/Laravel, this means: websockets in PHP. So I get back to

hack

Progressive PDF Loading

If you have large PDF documents to serve into a website, probably you don't want those are fetched entirely before showing to the user. And if you host them in AWS S3, you may also be concerned about bandwidth usage and costs. Mozilla's PDF.js handles

hack

Cropping Videos

Today, for the second time, I've published something on Dribbble: a demostration of the previously mentioned scrollable calendar. And, as I encoutered the same problems occourred at the first time, here I take some note for the next one. As I've not (yet?) received an invite

hack

Scrollable Calendar

In a web application of mine I've added a simple calendar to display time-based informations. Classic month view, colored cells, implemented with FullCalendar. Then, a user asked to not limit the view to a month at a time, but just display the current week and the next three

hack

Symbolic Links in FTP

Note for future myself: FTP doesn't supports symbolic linking, when you have to create a link in a folder just create a PHP file in the same folder as <?php symlink('original_file', 'link_file'); and run it through the browser.