
Ask HN: How do you like my PHP side projects? - aruggirello
Hello HN,<p>As a developer, I have a few PHP side projects:<p>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&#x2F;stripping away incompatible code.<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7861616<p>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).<p>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.<p>4. (perhaps too complex) a PHP opaque data storage layer for sessions&#x2F;user data on top of a database; designed to only make user data available to legitimate owners, which share them (or part) (via public&#x2F;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).<p>So, which project(s) would you prioritize? What should I do next? I would even be willing to sell them.
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dancryer
Hey Aruggirello - I'm one of the core developers of PHPCI
([https://www.phptesting.org](https://www.phptesting.org))

I 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.

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aruggirello
Yes, that would be interesting... PHPippo was originally built as a
preprocessor, but nothing prevents using it as a micro-optimizer, and/or to
report version issues only, with no preprocessing involved. A PHPCI plugin?
Let's see what I can do...

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jeffatrackaid
I deal with security and web site performance. If you can do for scraping what
Akismet has done for spam on WP, then you have a great product.

Aside from e-shops, forums (VB, PHPBB, etc) also have a lot of scraping for
forum meta-sites and cross-posting.

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aruggirello
my project employs several techniques to flag and block scrapers; note that
any technique will eventually fail against the 'perfect storm': a distributed
scraping network featuring camouflaged user agents operating from innocent-
looking IPs (from the same ISPs of your regular users) and performing a
single, RANDOM request each. There is little one could do to prevent scraping
in this scenario; fortunately enough, scraping bot developers don't usually
take all those precautions, so identifying them is often much, much easier
(some even proudly identify themselves in the user agent string... :)

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ohashi
I think 2 has potential for the CMS community (thinking WordPress). Security
plugins are quite popular. It might be something worth exploring if there was
demand from some of the hosting companies to license it.

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aruggirello
I was thinking more of the Magento/Oscommerce/Prestashop community, as shop
owners are obsessed by monitoring competitors, and bots scraping thousands of
pages are a common resource/plague there. A Wordpress plugin would be nice,
too.

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ohashi
Why not both? These CMS/Shop communities offer distribution for a service. It
fits well with the theme. I mentioned WordPress because it's the obvious 800
lb gorilla in the space.

