Ask HN: How do you like my PHP side projects?
As a developer, I have a few PHP side projects:
1. PHPippo, which I recently released on GitHub, is a PHP preprocessor and a PHP source micro-optimizer (the only free one I know of). PHPippo will soon gain version targeting, allowing users, say, to develop on latest PHP and deploy on PHP 5.2, with PHPippo altering/stripping away incompatible code.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7861616
2. a PHP anti-badbot class, which will block traffic from most scrapers, harvesters, etc., ensuring crawlers abide by your robots.txt policies, exploiting a number of culprits to discern legitimate users and crawlers from bad ones, taking action by logging, forbidding requests, or even banning originating IP(s). (IPv6 compatible).
3. a (multi-platform) PHP+MySQL customizable desktop activity monitor which monitors time spent within each application, possibly identifying the single files being edited, URLs visited, and automatically taking snapshots of unidentified windows. By saving data to a database, it enables tracking habits and usage patterns. I envisioned this tool for personal use; however, it could be deployed to monitor employees in a centralized manner, though this might be illegal in many countries.
4. (perhaps too complex) a PHP opaque data storage layer for sessions/user data on top of a database; designed to only make user data available to legitimate owners, which share them (or part) (via public/private key encryption) with authorized personnel only. Think of it as a database layer which, in case of breach, still protects your data, emails, credit card numbers, etc. from harvesting, while still allowing users to register, validate their email addresses, forget their passwords, and do whatever required with their user accounts (via a set of API).
So, which project(s) would you prioritize? What should I do next? I would even be willing to sell them.
8 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 32.3 ms ] threadI really like the sound of #1. Would you consider building a PHPCI plugin for it? I think it would be quite popular, especially the version targeting reporting.
Aside from e-shops, forums (VB, PHPBB, etc) also have a lot of scraping for forum meta-sites and cross-posting.