It’s been around the internet a bit already, but I can now show you what I’ve been working on for much of the time since I joined Schulze & Webb.

Enter Shownar:

What’s Shownar? Matt explained it over at Pulse Laser, the Schulze & Webb blog:

Shownar tracks millions of blogs and Twitter plus other microblogging services, and finds people talking about BBC telly and radio. Then it datamines to see where the conversations are and what shows are surprisingly popular.

And over at the BBC Internet Blog, Dan Taylor quotes the about page:

First, it will help you find shows that others have not only watched, but are talking about. Hopefully it’ll throw up a few hidden gems. People’s interest, attention and engagement with shows are more important to Shownar than viewing figures; the audience size of a documentary on BBC FOUR, for instance, will never approach that of EastEnders, but if that documentary sparks a lot of interest and comment – even discussion – we want to highlight it. And second, when you’ve found a show of interest, we want to assist your onward journey by generating links to related discussions elsewhere on the web. In the same way news stories are improved by linking out to the same story on other news sites, we believe shows are improved by connecting them to the wider discussion and their audience.

Of course, I didn’t work on this alone; as Matt points out, there was a good-sized team from both the BBC and Schulze & Webb, and it was great to work with so many talented and sharp people, all of whom have left their mark on the project.

People have been pretty enthusiastic so far, which is always nice to see. It’s also great been watching stories emerge – stories of what we found to watch or listen to in the office, ways our viewing and listening habits have changed, and there’s not much better praise than constantly wanting to use a thing you’ve made.

So there we go, Shownar. Another thing in the world.

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.