Keep your transaction logs forever!

Yes, I’ve turned the transaction log automation system I’ve been using for years into an actual product.  Heck, I like the new version much better than the old – it was a great excuse to hack on it and I might even sell a few copies.

The interesting thing is what was holding me back… well, two things really:  First, I reallllly didn’t want to be responsible for having anyone’s credentials (read “SL password”) going through any of my systems.  What LL really ought to do is implement a nice API where you can grant read-only access to your logs… think Facebook, Google, Twitter… well, just about any system that would like to interoperate with other web apps (yes, yes.  I know).  Anyway, it took some pondering and I’ve got a solution that does in-world generation of a per-user registration key for validation, and then the user installs and runs (and gives their password to) a small external program that checks the registration key against the account.  Simple and the truly paranoid can run a network sniffer to confirm that my program only talks to secondlife.com and not some shadowy password hoarder.

Second, getting it to work right was more effort than I wanted to give away for free.  Yes, I did it for myself, but there’s significant value in it (I think) and I don’t want to undervalue the effort required to get it to work right as a product.

So, I’m probably going to turn on the marketplace vendor soon and see what happens.  Should be interesting.

BTW: here’s the marketplace link: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/TrackTrans-v10-Registration-Box/5471168