Earlier this year I posted about finding hidden gems in your web stats. Of course half the battle is knowing what you are looking at. Stephen talks about seeing his competition checking him out via his web stats which reminded me of a funny story.

About 10 years ago when I was working for a web firm when we had an 'experience' with a local competitor. We knew the people that were starting up this new firm and we questioned their technical knowledge. This lack of knowledge was soon confirmed.

We were easily able to guess the domain name of the firm and visited their site. For quite a few days all that was online was the standard 'Welcome to Apache' home page. Periodic checks over the next week showed that the server was down more than it was up.

Then one day the owner of the new web firm showed up at our door and claimed, "You've hacked my web server and I have the logs to prove it" He was waving a stack of printouts for emphasis. He continued, "I've already called my attorney and the police." Of course we hadn't done anything.

We looked at the 'log files' and told him, "These are web server logs, this just shows that we've visited your web site a total of 10 times over the past week."

At first he didn't believe us, until we showed him what our Apache logs looked like. The icing on the cake was doing a grep for his IP space. Sure enough he had visited our site, or using his logic, 'hacked our web server'.