Hi Tower Software Guys

This site is syndicatable, meaning other websites or users with web tools called feed readers (of which there are many) can subscribe to my weblog, and get notified when I post a new entry. I generally don’t know who reads this weblog, as the access log is huge, and I normally don’t bother looking at it. Today, for fun, I was perusing the access log to see what browsers most of my readers use. I noticed regular occurrances of some feed readers accessing the site on a daily basis. One I saw was Sharpreader, a Windows rss reader, and another was Newsfire, for Mac. A third was Liferea for Linux, and a fourth was Onfolio, a plugin for Internet Explorer in Windows. The interesting thing about all these rss readers was that they all were accessing my site from the same IP address subnet, which means they were probably multiple people from the same company. I did a reverse lookup on one of the IP addresses, and guess what I found?

dig -t ptr 254.68.17.203.in-addr.arpa.

resulting in:

254.68.17.203.in-addr.arpa. 120 IN PTR tower-gw.towersoft.com.au.

That’s right, I have some subscribers from Tower Software, makers of TRIM Context, the enterprise software we use for records management. Hi Tower guys! I knew they periodically looked at my blog, from communications I’ve had with them before, but I didn’t realize there were any subscribers. From my log files, it appears I only have about a dozen subscribers, and at least four of them are from Tower. Wow.

That’s customer attention, all right. I’ve had difficulty with their software, but when you communicate your problem to them, they go out of their way to make sure it gets handled.

Update: Geez, these guys really pay attention: Michael, Lindsay and Gord have already posted about this post.