They decided to run a story on my happy little bot this morning. I didn’t know about it, came back from lunch – and I had 100 users. (For the last week, that number has been stubbornly stuck at 8).

I poked a little further, and realized that only 20 of those 100 users had twitter accounts. Hmm – I guess I better get email notifications working, eh?

In the five to six minutes that it took me to whip up an email solution, I added another 15 users. Wow. It suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t know where this traffic was coming from – I hadn’t gotten around to adding google analytics code yet.

tail -f /var/log/httpd/buylater-access.log…

Ah. Lifehacker.

Here’s what happened to my user counts (new users per hour, and per day):

1      12      2008-03-28
20     13     2008-03-28
45     14     2008-03-28
57     15     2008-03-28
35     16     2008-03-28
20     17     2008-03-28
20     18     2008-03-28
22     19     2008-03-28
12     20     2008-03-28
12     21     2008-03-28
12     22     2008-03-28
15     23     2008-03-28
8       0     2008-03-29
7       1     2008-03-29
1       2     2008-03-29
2       3     2008-03-29
3       4     2008-03-29

I have to admit the 57-new-user peak was pretty exciting – nothing like a new user every minute to blow your socks off.

I quickly started having problems, of course – as the user count climbed, so too did the item count – which meant I was hammering Amazon’s API almost continuously. They didn’t like that, and started bouncing some of my replies. Luckily, I found this article that explained how to query up to 10 items per API request, which means I’ve been able to maintain an update interval of less than 3 minutes. (I’ll tune that for the most popular / rapidly changing items soon.)

For about an hour, a bug in my email function (the one I whipped up in the first 5 minutes) caused everyone to receive blank emails (sorry about that one). Oh, and I stopped echoing ALL the item updates to the twitter stream after the first 20 minutes or so.

I tried to jump into the comments on lifehacker, the consumerist.com, and a couple of other blog posts, but since I didn’t have a preapproved account, my comments don’t appear to have shown up. Ah well.

After the first bug report got filed by way of Jesse Andrews (who was kind enough to route it back to me), I threw a form up on the front page of the website to collect this priceless feedback. My favorite so far – apparently the beautiful web2.0 autogenerated logo I was using is “worse than nothing.” I wonder what they would think of my Web 2.0 Merit Badge (which I made for the Twitter Color Wars.)

So there isn’t really any summary statement just yet – tomorrow I’ll be able to start combing through the feedback, see how many of the users “stuck”, and go from there.

It doesn’t matter how good you are, or how many hours you work – if you don’t bill for it, you ain’t gonna get paid. Now I’ve put together a little tool that will allow you to keep track of how you’re spending your time (and BILL for it, if that’s your thing) – no matter where you are, or what you’re doing. 

It’s a Twitter app, you see. So you can talk to it from:

• A webpage
• An instant-messaging client, or
• Your phone (via text-messaging)

You don’t even have to set up an account first – just follow http://twitter.com/timetrack, wait a minute or two for the bot to start following you back, and then send simple messages like this:

d timetrack start washingfloors
d timetrack stop washingfloors

If you match up the start and stop commands, the bot will total up the time for you. (Don’t worry, we’ll give you the exact times of every action regardless, so you can clean things up later if you forget something.)

Now, here’s my question for you – what sort of reports and exports would you like to see? Here are a few I’m considering:

• SalesForce.com export
• Blinksale (Invoicing) data
• CSV / Excel spreadsheet data
• XML / JSON
• Quickbooks payroll data

What have I missed?

If you get a strange, visceral pleasure in wasting hours, even days, of your life, waiting for your local WalMart to get more Beanie Babies in stock – then you should stop reading right now.

If you like to revisit your local grocery store every night, just to see if they’ve dropped the price on those great donuts in aisle 4… then hit the Back Button, and read something else.

But – if you have a life, and you still want to try and buy something online – I might have something that can help.

It’s called BuyLater, and that’s exactly what it’s for – buying Amazon products, later on.

Later can be: When it’s back “In Stock” (can someone say Wii?), or simply when it’s a little cheaper (or even on sale).

Unlike many of my ideas (which are unique, innovative, and incomprehensible), this one actually isn’t mine. My buddy Jesse Andrews did it first, with a Wii-only bot called WiiMe. I just took the idea, and strreeettched it a little.