Blog

Piwik to replace Google Analytics

Since the PRISM “scandal” (yes, everybody already knew that the USA have been spying on us at least since 2001), we see lots of open-source solutions emerging to replace the “old” proprietary (and potentially a bit too curious) web-applications. A good example is DuckDuckGo, an anonymous Internet search engine that has seen its traffic exploding after the revelations (1.5 million queries / day on 01/01/2013, almost 3.5 millions queries / day today). You can see the evolution of the traffic on their website.

I’ve been trying for a while to clean my digital footprint (I still have a lot to do), and to reduce my dependency to proprietary services, but some major solutions are unavoidable, like GMail (or YMail). A few weeks ago, I’ve managed to replace a Google service, Google Analytics, by an open-source, self-hosted application, Piwik.

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Include PropelORM in a PHP project

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PropelORM is an open-source Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) for PHP5. It allows you to access your database using a set of objects, providing a simple API for storing and retrieving data.

In this article, I’ll explain how to use PropelORM in an existing PHP project.

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Comics Calendar

I’m an avid comic books reader, mostly from the Marvel franchise (X-Men, Spider-Man, Avengers…), and some DC too (Batman, Superman…). But every series has its own monthly release date, which makes difficult to follow what the current issue is for a series.

That’s why I’ve developed an on-line calendar that regroups the release dates for all new comic books issues. The data are retrieved from ComicVine, which is a huge wiki-based website for comics.

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