About

Daniel Duriš is an SEO expert, a tech speaker and a cycling advocate.

Daniel Duriš

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.

I am also 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

  • by email: dusoft@staznosti.sk
  • Mastodon / ActivityPub: @dusoft@fosstodon.org
  • using LinkedIn

Some of my current 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.
  • Air Quality Monitor – Open source air quality monitoring based on Luftdaten open source sensors.

Some of my earlier projects

I have abandoned these for the time being.

  • 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.
  • 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.).
  • 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).
  • Ebook Hub 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.
  • 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.
  • Fly Smart was a scraping website that offered an overview of cheap flight tickets before any larger comparison tools such as Google Flights 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.”

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 – 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