18
October
2009
  • "If / when telly people complain that their industry was blind-sided by the internet/interactivity I think it might be fair to point out that this was made in 1990. And that it was shown – ON THE TELLY. Or would that be mean?" Douglas Adams' documentary "Hyperland", a crash course in hypertext written and shown pre-the-web.
  • "The best games communicate their systems to us in ways that feel satisfying, and the quality of this dialogue between player and game often determines the success or failure of the game." Michael Abbott's been playing Demon's Souls.
  • "Raphaël is a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. If you want to create your own specific chart or image crop and rotate widget, for example, you can achieve it simply and easily with this library." Looks really rather interesting, and potentially beautiful.
25
June
2009

An ExceptionNotifier for CodeIgniter

CodeIgniter really is turning out to be The Little PHP Framework That Could. I’ve now dived pretty deep into it and still have few complaints; as I’ve said before, it makes all the boring stuff easy, has almost no “magic”, and stays out of the way.

As the application moves towards production, though, I began to miss a few things from Rails – notably, its ExceptionNotifier plugin. ExceptionNotifier will send you an email every time there’s an error on the site, which is really very useful with production applications.

So I investigated alternatives for CodeIgniter. I stumbled across this Stack Overflow post, which basically outlines exactly what I was looking for.

Except it doesn’t work.

Never mind! We can fix that, and the end result is MY_Exceptions.php:

(You might want to “view raw” on that – there’s some funky syntax-highlighting going on).

This really does work out-of-the-box with CodeIgniter 1.7.x. You just drop it into system/application/library, call it MY_Exceptions.php, and it’ll extend the existing Exceptions library. Obviously, you’re going to need to change a lot of the obvious details like email addresses you want things sent to, and the name of the production domain you’ve configured in your app’s config.php. You also need to make sure the error log level is set to “1″ or higher in that config.php file. But that’s about it; it really does work, and means that in production alone, you’ll get email from your app when a PHP error gets thrown, along with not only the line number and file the error was thrown in, but the URL that the user was accessing to generate the problem.

Not bad for an hour’s work. And, because it’s a Gist, you can either copy and paste, or just clone it straight into your application.

Links & notes for this month

Endnotes