My
web app project includes logging functionality so we can see where visitors are coming from (referrer URL), what the popular
user agents are, what pages are most popular, etc. The log is stored in SQL Server, and when I query the
user agents I use a large (almost 100 lines) and growing CASE statement to separate the
user agents using string matching (i.e. if the
user agent contains the string "Firefox/9" then it's Firefox 9). Is there a better way to do this so I don't have to continually add to that CASE statement to deal with new browser releases?
Also, how should I deal with less common, weird/unknown
user agents? I've seen the following in the logs and been unable to find good information online about what they are:
WordPress/3.3.1; http://www.facecolony.org
Mozilla/4.0 ( http://www.hairirons.org redips; <a href=http://hairirons.org/>chi hair iron</a>)
I'd guess they're bots/crawlers, but the sites they point to don't appear to reference
web crawlers (or even be available sometimes). I've seen other
user agents aren't familiar to me, but I know they're bots because they include "bot" or "spider" or something similar in them.
