Perl for Web Site Management

Chapter 19. Keeping Track of Users

One of the things I find fascinating about the Web is the way it presents a real-life version of the Hindu fable of the blind men and the elephant. Each of us comes to the Web from a different background, and the Web is so new, so full of unexplored possibilities, that we tend to see it through the filter of our previous experience. To people from the world of TV and movies, the Web’s highest calling is as a means of delivering interactive video. To graphic designers and commercial artists, the most engaging thing about the Web is its potential as a visual design medium. To people from the world of printed books and periodicals, the Web holds promise primarily as a publishing tool, a way to get their words in front of a global audience.

Professionally I’m most closely aligned with that last point of view because in my pre-web career I was a writer and editor for various trade magazines. But I see the Web through another filter, one more compelling for me than the one provided by my professional background. To me, the Web is an extension of previous online communities. Interactive discussion groups, like the global Usenet, or the smaller worlds of hobbyist bulletin board systems, have been an intensely absorbing experience for me for many years. Real-time multiuser environments, MUDs and MOOs and various other incarnations of user-to-user chat, have similarly played a big part in my recreational computing. And it isn’t all just fun and games. Much ...