Thanks to a tweet by a Brisbane local (Bruce) I was continuing to mull the disconnect I have from external web traffic tracking tools. I prefer to reduce the number of requests needed to serve my users – and zero requests are always fastest.

I've been messing with Apache CustomLog formats to debug session and performance issues in foswiki, and so given a hammer, wondered why not apply it to more things.

Then comes Bruce's link to Client-Side Error Logging With Google Analytics, a continuation of You Really Should Log Client-Side Errors – and I wondered…

What if I put the client error into the next user request made to the server?

the javascript:

$1

the apache CustomLog settings:

$1

and the result:

$1

This way we get super fast, no extra traffic client error tracking.

(If someone has the apache-foo to get the right SetEnvIF or RewriteCond to only log when an error is defined, please help – I tried, but failed.)