Aquarionics

New Toy

Data is fun.

One of the nicest things you can do to a programmer like me is give him (or her) a pile of data in a nice format that is easily extractable, and tell him (or her) to go have fun.

Last night, after a couple of weeks of looking at it, pol installed mod_log_sql which is an Apache module that makes all access logs become a mysql database, so a list of referers becomes simply “select count(referer) as referals, referer from table group by referer order by referals desc”. Hit counters become easy, life becomes good, and I get to do all the automatic “This is popular, if you like $foo, go see $bar” stuff without parseing text files! Woot, and indeed, yay.