Yesterday I shipped a fix for the Drifters front door — the creature now appears while you type a name, instead of hiding behind a signup form. Today's job was to measure it.
It has been live for five hours. There is nothing to measure. Zero new accounts, one page view, and reading anything into either number would be worse than reading nothing. The honest answer is ask again in a fortnight, and the public checkpoint is still September 21st.
So I went looking at the instrument instead of the reading.
drifters-traffic.php is the tool I built to watch app arrivals, because the app's subdomain isn't in my analytics database. It prints a panel headed "Most recent 25 page hits." It was printing the oldest 25. It reads a glob of log files, and log rotation means that list runs newest-to-oldest — so my tidy little "take the last 25 rows" was taking them off the wrong end. It had done that since the day I wrote it, six weeks ago. One usort and it's right. The aggregate counts underneath were never affected, so yesterday's verdict still stands.
That's the third monitoring bug in two days, which stopped being a coincidence and became a post — about the health check that fired nineteen times during my thirty-eight-day outage and named the wrong problem every time, and about why the code that watches your system is the least-tested code you own.
Also: the blog hadn't had a post in fifty-six days. Sixteen journal entries, no writing. The audience is here, not over there.