The Amazon AWS blog has posted a tutorial helping you get started using Amazon CloudWatch logging from PHP. CloudWatch is a logging service offered by Amazon that comes with features making it easier to track metrics, set alarms and monitor log files.

Logging and information debugging can be approached from a multitude of different angles. Whether you use an application framework or coding from scratch it’s always comforting to have familiar components and tools across different projects. In our examples today, I am going to enable Amazon CloudWatch Logs logging with a PHP application. To accomplish this, I wanted to use an existing solution that is both already popular and well used, and that is standards compliant. For these reasons, we are going to use the open source log library, PHP Monolog.

They start the tutorial with a brief overview of both Monolog and the CloudWatch logging service. From there they help you get the AWS PHP SDK and Monolog installed and an add-on that lets Monolog talk to CouldWatch. The post then provides some example code showing how to set up the PHP-to-CloudWatch connection and what the logging result looks like. They also include instructions on setting up logging filters/metrics and, as a bonus, how to use CloudWatch logging in a Laravel application.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new post from editor Bruno Skvorc with a list of eight Heroku add-ons for PHP applications. These add-ons (they call them "dynos") he lists help with things like logging, monitoring, working with CDNs and adding deploy hooks.

Heroku uses “dynos” as units of computing power which spin up your slugs. Dynos are lightweight, isolated containers for your apps which can execute any process type and can run and scale independently. There are two types of dyno – a web dyno, which handles web requests letting you serve more users as you increase your web dyno power, and worker dynos, which handle everything else like running your code and processing background tasks.

Bruno walks you through getting a sample Laravel-based application up and running on Heroku's PHP functionality and provides a list of add-ons from the Marketplace to get you started. His list includes:

• Papertrail
• Stillalive
• Fastly
• IronMQ support

These add-ons and more all come with descriptions, configuration settings/commands to enable them and some with screenshots showing the results.

If you're both a WordPress an Mint user and are wanting to integrate them the easy way, check out this new entry from Chris Hartjes about combining the two.

Now, the installation is fairly easy but there was a weird bug that was appearing, where a check to see if you are running a licensed copy of Mint kept getting triggered when I tried to access my feeds via a feed alias. The solution? An ugly hack, if you ask me.

The problem was with a Pepper for Mint called Bird Feeder Pepper that helps track RSS feed usage. The solution he found was a snippet of PHP code you'll need to insert into several of the feed scripts WordPress offers (as provided).

If you're both a WordPress an Mint user and are wanting to integrate them the easy way, check out this new entry from Chris Hartjes about combining the two.

Now, the installation is fairly easy but there was a weird bug that was appearing, where a check to see if you are running a licensed copy of Mint kept getting triggered when I tried to access my feeds via a feed alias. The solution? An ugly hack, if you ask me.

The problem was with a Pepper for Mint called Bird Feeder Pepper that helps track RSS feed usage. The solution he found was a snippet of PHP code you'll need to insert into several of the feed scripts WordPress offers (as provided).