Tom Dalton :: Doer of Good

Here's a fun challenge that was presented to me at work:

We had one hour, to take 100 newly registered domain names and put up websites and tracking on them. We needed to be able to tell how many people visited each website. I figured there was no way we were going to be able to create 100 separate websites, so I'd have to make one and have it automatically display the right content. I'd never done that before, but I've seen it done in other places, so I figured I could do it.

The domains were registered at Godaddy, so I used their batch editing tool to point all 100 at my (personal) hosting reseller space. (We didn't have time to register new hosting or anything like that, so it's handy that I had this reseller account available!)

On the backend of the hosting space, however, no bulk editing tool was available. I needed to add all 100 domain names to the nameserver, so I wrote a macro to loop through the names and enter them for me. That took about five minutes to write, then I started it running.

While it did that, I went to Google and looked up the PHP commands to read a domain name -- to figure out which domain people had entered to get to the website. There were numerous examples, so I grabbed the code from a clean one and dropped it into my page. It worked the first time I tested it. (How often does THAT happen?) That whole process took about another five minutes.

Then I needed to get tracking code up on these sites. We usually use Omniture's enterprise-level SiteCatalyst for tracking, but there is a lot of overhead and it takes a while to set up, in several areas. Way more time than we had available.

I briefly considered adapting a simple php page-tracking script I wrote last year for another client, but that didn't feel right. I'm still not sure if it really wouldn't work, but it's not the most reliable script even when it's working properly. (The client I wrote it for originally didn't pay us for it, so I never built in any error-checking or bot detection or any of the hundred other things a robust tool should have.)

One of my coworkers had been pushing us to look at another site analytics tool, WebStat. I called him in and asked if they had a free trial. We discussed it as I browsed quickly through the website to make sure it would do what we needed. I downloaded the free version and installed it on the web page.

Amazingly, that, too, worked the first time I tested it. I plugged the php variable for the detected domain name into the WebStat tracking code, so it would read the domain names and report those as pages viewed.

And that was that! I had 100 websites created and configured with tracking code. I had reporting that would show us how many visitors each domain got. And I had done it all within the ridiculous one-hour window we needed it in. In fact, the whole process took about 37 minutes.

Hooray! I don't think anyone at work truly appreciates the enormity of that accomplishment. So I post it on my website and hope that someone, somewhere will read this and say, "what a guy!" :o)

(Even if that someone is only me!)