I was quite sceptical if an online conference could make me pay attention in the same way a “physical” conference could. Spoiler: It could. There were some minor issues, such as not so perfect sound, but it was sufficient. The conference took place at an online platform (hopin). All sessions were pre-recorded and made available for all attendees after the conference.

On many of our Websites we have contact forms. And recently there seems to be an elevated number of bots filling out these forms with spam data. That’s especially a problem, when a contact form is directly connected to an Issue Tracker, that automatically generates an issue when a mail to a specified address arrives. A possible solution for avoiding automated form-fills is using CAPTCHAs.

C reate R ead U pdate D elete — these operations describe the most common tasks a relational database is used for. A common task on top of that, is to build interfaces for users, to execute these operations in a nice way and create a frontend for these task.

Web-scraping is ugly, but sometimes it may become necessary, because services don’t expose an API to retrieve data. Basically web-scraping is a mechanism to programatically open a website and grab the contents in order to using it for own purposes. The mission In one of our sites, we are using the HTML output of a not-that-hip-anymore-database allegro.

Central Logging Service for Distributed Applications With the release of our great new presentation layer for the Goettingen Digitization Centre we faced new problems. The Application consists of many different separate services (and servers). For example a Symfony frontend application, separate applications to deliver and process IIIF manifests and images.

The continuous integration toolchain has developed a lot during the last years. Our mission, to build and deploy everything completely automatic and reproducable became more and more elegant. But let me take you back into the ancient halls of our workflows. Let’s take a TYPO3 CMS website. We built sites with this PHP-based Content Management System for ages, but let’s skip the dark woods of Subversion.

Twitter for Goettingen Digitisation Centre / Göttinger Digitalisierungszentrum Did you know, that with the current relaunch of the GDZ (Göttinger Digitalisierungszentrum), we implemented a small bridge to Twitter that tweets out the newly scanned works? This feature was integrated in our Symfony App using the simple endroid/twitter library. Feel free to follow this unofficial account at @just_scanned.

Symfony console For a rather small task we needed to build a standalone command line app to process and copy some files. Our first approach to that included using the JVM (Java, Kotlin), because it needed to be deployable and runnable without any great hassle. But going a little further we skipped that approach and remembered the great Symfony Console which provides a quite simple interface.