People occasionally ask me how my DCist SMS thingy is going. Usually, I have to say that I have no idea. My early configuration options weren't quite right, which would lead to unresponsiveness every few days. So most of what little time I had to spend on the service was used debugging it. I think it's finally stable — at least, I haven't had to restart the scripts or reboot the phone in a week or two. And I've got a monitoring system in place to tell me when things really go to hell.

But I'd never spent any time going over the stats that the system has dutifully collected. Charles has been telling me that the little light signifying an incoming message has been going off more often (it's over by the TV), so I thought I'd have a look. The short version: it gets between two and three hundred requests per week, made by a little under a hundred users. I haven't yet crunched the numbers (it'd be a nasty SQL query), but I imagine that those are mostly the same folks, week to week. It's not really being publicized anymore, after all.

I can't decide if I'd like LastCall to be more popular or not — on the one hand, I put a lot of effort into it and would like to see people get some use out of it. On the other, more users means more stress on the system, more bug reports, and more of my time spent trying to support it. Overall, it seems to be in a place where I can mostly ignore it, and it's occasionally useful to myself and others. I'm pretty happy with that.