Hire Carl to Track Your Logs

We learned a lot of interesting things from the Getting Real book by 37signals. This book influenced how we build and promote not only our web applications but also 1Passwd — Password Manager for Mac OS X. This story is about how we learned to track our logs:

You need to know who's talking about you. Check your logs and find out where the buzz is coming from. Who's linking to you? Who's bitching about you? Which blogs listed at Technorati, Blogdex, Feedster, Del.icio.us are hot on your trail?

Find out and them make your presence felt. Leave comments at those blogs. Thank you people for posting links. Ask them if they want to be included on your special advance list so they'll be among the first to know about the future releases, updates, etc.

Google Analytics gives an overview of the website traffic and a summary of referrals — great to look at every morning to see the big picture. We felt that the overview is not enough and wanted to have something more dynamic — live tracking of the incoming referrals. Sounds like a lot of work, who is going to do it?

Meet Carl...

Carl is a Senior System Administrator at Agile Web Solutions. Carl is a busy fellow—he monitors the servers, backs up the database, provides daily reports and now he also tracks the logs. Carl is so good at what he is doing, he forces us to give him a raise almost every quarter ;).

Carl is a perfect albeit virtual employee. He lives in a set of Ruby scripts that are scheduled as cron jobs on the server.

Once every 20 minutes we get an e-mail like this:

---

From:	carl@agilewebsolutions.com
Subject:	2 Referrers And 2 Queries
Date:	August 25, 2006 8:31:02 PM EDT (CA)
To:	1passwd@agilewebsolutions.com

New referrers: