tech | Gerben Jacobs

meter; the HTML5 element

📅 May 14, 2014 — 🧮 427 words — 🏷️ tech web

I'm amazed at how often I still "discover" a new HTML5 element. I say discover because really they're all written down in specs. But then again, who reads specs for their enjoyment? Today I discovered the meter-element (by first discovering the progress-element). They're essentially the same, except that <meter> also adds some sugary deliciousness in the form of colouring. It's here that you should note that IE10 (and higher) only support <progress> at the moment and not <meter>.

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Piwik, a free open-source analytics tool

📅 Mar 5, 2014 — 🧮 250 words — 🏷️ tech

I have been using Piwik for a couple of months and I love it. I started using it first at my internship at leadelephant.com, not really as an analytics tool, but more as a data collection tool. The main goal of Piwik is an analytics tool, a direct competitor to Google Analytics. But it's really more than that. Like the data collection method I just mentioned, it could also be a community monitoring tool, which is how we use it at Habbies.

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Akismet doesn't cut it anymore, utilize Cloudflare against spam

📅 Feb 27, 2014 — 🧮 200 words — 🏷️ tech

Spam queue in Wordpress I have been noticing a severe drop in spam in my comment queue. I used to have to delete anywhere from 5 to 10 comments a day in the queue with just Akismet. Now there's not one comment.. 99.99% of the time. I didn't really think anything of it until I just realized why this change occurred; I had enabled Cloudflare for my blog. Cloudflare saving requests and thus MBs Cloudflare acts as somewhat of a firewall and CDN in one, it blocks malicious requests and serves cached versions of your blog/site/resources.

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The problem(s) with Open Data

📅 Sep 17, 2013 — 🧮 1556 words — 🏷️ tech

To put this blog post into context; this is written by a 25-year-old developer who uses the Dutch open data (https://data.overheid.nl) and doesn't like to read too much. I rather hack tutorials than read specs and I code stuff for the use of the public, i.e.: data needs to accommodate to the common people. With that out of the way and allowing you to see this from my perspective here goes; the biggest problem(s) with Open Data.

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My first experience with PagodaBox

📅 May 10, 2013 — 🧮 597 words — 🏷️ tech

What is PagodaBox This blog post is written about what would now be known as Pagoda v1 and might not be representative. Pagoda Box PagodaBox.com is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) for PHP. They have plans for Ruby and Python, but they're not here yet as of this writing. At Pagoda you can launch components, such as; web (Apache + PHP), database (I know MySQL works for a fact), cache (Memcache or Redis), worker and cron job (beta).

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Quickly create an empty stdClass object in PHP

📅 Apr 19, 2013 — 🧮 112 words — 🏷️ tech php

I was working on a Laravel project and had to work with a Eloquent ORM object; I then needed to create an empty stdClass object. There's a chance that a person is not known and being lazy I wanted to fill the form anyway with my Person object, so I needed a mockup of that object. <?php $person = (object) array_fill_keys( array('firstname', 'lastname', 'email', 'photo'), '' ); ?> I'd say this solution is quick and dirty.

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Hi!

I’m a 35-year-old software engineer from The Netherlands. My interests lie with (web)development, databases, design patterns, social media, communities, APIs and open data.

More about me, including links to other online services, can be found at gerben.dev