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

Deprecated

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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