Automating your daily work - dealing with web logs

For techies, there's many many tools to automate things. Lots of scripting languages, multiple open source libraries, articles and tutorials on sites like IBM developerworks & ServerSide. All that's required is an inclination to automate and time.

For more of a business user, there's not really a tool that makes it easy to automate. You can either find a service that solves your problem, hire someone to write some scripts and then keep paying them to make updates when things change, do the thing less often but in the good old-fashioned manual way.

PAW is intended to help the business user automate their work... the repetitive part. You can download files from a server (there's a tutorial on this), you can import and parse the file, find the specific data points, and then summarize it. If necessary, you can combine your web log data with information in your customer database. Things like the # of page hits in a session measured against when they registered on your website.

Best of all, you do small bits in PAW and see the results right away. If something doesn't work, you know right away and can fix it. You're working on your data, kind of like what you do in a spreadsheet.

We would love to get feedback on whether this mix of being able to automate and see your results quickly is the right blend of immediacy, automation, and ad-hoc processing.

Bookmarking data

When the browser was introduced, one of the first innovations to really take off was the bookmark. We got used to bookmarking pages containing useful information... Similarly, very often, in the work environment, we are trying to keep on top of a few critical pieces of information. It might be the project budget, sales to date for my region, or updates to certain bugs that I need to re-test. Our goal is to allow the user to link to that piece of information and bring it into the user's context, rather than the user needing to open up the application or web page and then navigate to find that piece of data.

With the PAW tool, you can define the process to get to those snippets of information, in some cases calculated. Then you can very easily get updates for that data in the PAW environment. In essence, you've bookmarked that data!