About
Daniel Duriš is an SEO expert, a tech speaker and a cycling advocate.
My name is Daniel Duris (nickname: dusoft) and Ambience is my blog. I started this blog in 2003 in Slovak and switched to English in 2010.
I am very keen on all internet stuff and work at Basta digital, a digital marketing agency that I co-founded in 2006. I specialize in strategic consulting, SEO, digital analytics and data integration/automation. I have extensive experience with data scraping and cleaning. I also love working with APIs.
I am also a co-founder and a former president of Cycling Coalition, an expert advocacy group that has been improving cycling conditions in Bratislava and Slovakia since 2010.
You can visit my Github repositories – I work mostly in PHP and Lua.
I am open to collaborate or work on interesting and innovative web stuff. Contact me below.
Public Speaking
I have been speaking publicly at various events – international conferences, community meetups or tutoring for university students.
I am open for speaking engagements on the following topics (in English and Slovak):
- SEO, analytics, data integration, automation and other digital marketing topics,
- cycling infrastructure and placemaking.
I have presented at 30+ events in past few years in person and remotely. I will provide you with my references on request.
Contact me
My current software projects
- Kid-Sized Cities – this collaboration with an urbanist Mikael Colville-Andersen offers interactive games for kids to plan cities to their liking. You can find these interactive games under Play link in the website’s menu.
- The Arrogance of Space Mapping Tool – a tool to help people to visualize how much space is wasted in our cities to non-efficient modes of transport.
- Google tools – a various tools interacting with Google services APIs. It includes a reporting tool interacting with MyBusiness API (Google Business Profiles tool) and Search Console API (Search Console tool) developed in Laravel. It automatically pulls data to a database and Google Sheets for further analysis. It allows for automated Google Business Profiles post submission, review and question answering and other automated bulk edits.
- Overseer – a custom digital agency system that includes invoicing, time tracking, CRM, HR, business planning and reporting etc.
- Bicycle Master Plan – an app that allows to display any OSM data on a custom map. You can easily configure a map with bicycle and cycling related data (or any other) in multiple layers.
My earlier software projects
I have abandoned these for the time being.
EbookHood was a website that allowed users to share their ebooks with friends and convert it to different formats. Parts of the code were later donated to another ebook website. PC Mag featured it in its Best of the Internet column.
I created iPod eBook Creator for iPod Notes that allowed users to convert longer text and convert it to a convenient reading format for iPods. This was before there was any convenient ebook technology and addressed the 4 kb limitation of iPod Notes.
“Daniel Duris has developed iPod eBook Creator, an unofficial tool for converting text files into iPod eBooks.” (The Guardian: Will the eBook finally replace paper?, 5 Oct 2006)
“Upload any large text file to the eBook creator and it spits out a zip file. Unzip and place on your iPod.” (Lifehacker: How to make iPod eBooks, 8 Mar 2005)
This tool was very popular and got lots of mentions all over the world by O’Reilly, Jerusalem Post, Taipei Times, Make:, Engadget, Digital Bits, Digital Inspiration, Learning Path and many others.
Open source bicycle sharing system that I have co-developed. It allows anyone to launch a low-cost bike sharing system in their community or within a company or a school. It works using web, SMS or a QR code and doesn’t require any infrastructure (stations etc.).
Fly Smart was a scraping website that offered an overview of cheap flight tickets before any larger comparison tools such as Google Flights or SkyScanner existed.
Absolut Engine was an early CMS preceding WordPress by 5 years that was SEO focused and allowed plugins. It was used by hundreds of websites and also used as a base PHP framework for other projects of mine.
As mentioned by Free Software Foundation:
“Advanced news publishing system. It features 3 layer access (admin/chief/editor), article posting, editing and deleting, an image managment tool, a file manager, and an articles manager. The built-in WYSIWYG editor lets users produce XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant code via rich text editing. User can extend the package via module functionality – any required addons/plugins (modules) can be created and added to the system. Modules currently included are Discussions, Surveys, RSS Feed, Search Engine Optimization, and a message system for better communication between users.”
Digital signage for companies – running on Raspberry Pi and integrating data from external systems.
EIA Scraper – European Union Environmental Impact Assessment project scraper, processor and notifier for Slovakia.
Bicycle count – a helper for traffic counting. It generates easy-to-print PDFs that traffic counters can use to mark down observed data. It takes a CSV/TSV file and generates a PDF/table with all directions for easy counting.
Air Quality Monitor – Open source air quality monitoring based on Luftdaten open source sensors.
Games
I have released only a couple of games. All others are just prototypes or demos.
I have been working on and off on a boat arcade called Captain Babusa in Mauritius (working title) in LÖVE/Lua.
Journey to India was going to be an Oregon Trail-like game in LÖVE/Lua featuring Indian hand-drawn public domain illustrations from New York Public Library collections.
Mystery of Disappearing Stairs was an experiment with hyperlocal geo-fenced reality game written in HTML/CSS/Javascript as a progressive web application.
I wrote a short text adventure (interactive fiction) titled Pali Teskobar in Choice Script/Javascript released for transmedia experience along a book of poetry and fiction.
I developed an urban transport simulation game written in Lua / LÖVE framework with goal of teaching players to manager transport and introduce traffic regulations for livable city (working demo).
I worked on the Political system political simulation and story telling engine written in Lua / LÖVE framework (working demo).
There have been bunch of other games I wrote – mostly text adventures – that were popular in the interactive fiction community in Czechia and Slovakia in the 1990’s.
Programming experience
- PHP – 20+ years of extensive professional experience, mostly Laravel framework these days
- Extensive experience with data processing and automation using CSV, XML, JSON, PDF, DOC(X), XLS(X), custom text + binary formats, email (POP3/IMAP/SMTP), multitude of APIs (REST + SOAP)
- Javascript (+AppScript) – proficient
- Lua – proficient
- Python – limited experience
- R – limited experience
- HTML + CSS – proficient, I used to be active in the web standards movement back in the 2000’s
Long time ago
- Pascal (later Delphi)
- BASIC (and limited Z80 assembly)