Watching the bots go by

Monday evening. 7:30 and its’s dark already. The day has gone by rather quickly which is often the way when trying to finish the last 1% of something that is just about ready to go live.

I’ve found a relatively quiet table in the Red Lion to see if my latest widget works over a tethered phone connection. The bit of the widget you would see as a visitor is a chat messaging system. You can click an icon to trigger a ‘toast’ and send a message which would appear almost instantaneously on one or more of the machines I am usually surrounded by. Behind the scenes there’s a bit more going on.

Thread lost: blokes at the bar are discussing world affairs which distracting and depressing.

So, missing the middle of the story, the system - that quietly went live a couple of hours ago - now pings me when potential customers* arrive at my site. It currently also pings when a bot requests a page too, as has just happened. On this occasion is was one of Google’s bots. The previous one one was probably a Microsoft bot. It was from an IP address reportedly owned by Microsoft but I can’t see the User Agent without digging a bit deeper. I expect I’ll tweak things to push bot info into the background where it belongs, and generally make things more sophisticated, but for now time says time to go.