I’m working on improving the site logging for our web server, both for the work server and the user pages (like this one) that are hosted here… One of the things I’m enabling is the ‘referer’ log, basically tracking how people stumble across our site.
There’s a good reason for this, besides my being basically nosy. As we go ‘live’ with more client sites on our server, it’ll help us decide where to advertise based on tracking how people are looking for information on us. If the vast majority of people visiting us are coming to us from Google, it’ll show up in the log and we’ll know we’re doing well.
On the other hand, if most of our hits are from XXX sites, we’ll know that one of our clients is abusing our web hosting services…
It’s kind of scary how much information about computer use I can get, even as a fairly low level system administrator. There’s a rather fun collection of stories about a business sysadmin over at the U.K. technology site The Register. It’s called Bastard Operator From Hell, or BOFH for short. Stop over and read them sometime… They’ll know I sent you.
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