Technology- Real Time Log Reporting
I admit that I like to watch my server logs in real-time. I know its a sickness,
and Im not really trying to do anything to get over it. When I built a web-server back
in 1996 when there was still a market for web-servers, our killer feature in Boulevard
was that it had a bunch of cool graphs so you could sit at the console like a vulture
and watch the blips come in as users accessed your site.
Now that Im running several web-sites again I of course wanted to have something
similar again. Partly it is related to my philosophy of build, get in front of real users,
and iterate. Having a really tight connection to whats happening, what activity is popular,
what gets lift is important. But I think it also goes beyond the practical into the psychology
of building software live on the internet. I tweak the UI and watch for the difference my
changes may make. For example I made some changes last week and there was a pretty noticeable
difference in how many people found their way past the find feeds UI to an actual calendar
I’ve built a little WinForms app that downloads updates from the server logs every 5 minutes, scans through the
data and does various custom analysis including popular pages (broken down to specific parts of the site), bot analysis,
and whatever else strikes my fancy. Its really easy to update and add new stuff, especially since its pretty brute-force
on the actual data analysis side.
Calendar Feed for the day- Computer Industry Conferences including
the upcoming Apple WWDC in two weeks. I’m sure I’m missing many interesting conferences- again this calendar is in wiki mode
so any registered user can add new events to it.
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