So this past week I have been doing a lot of logging, parsing, and graphing. I was sitting there wondering what I could do to make the Apache access logs easier to work with. Then it hit me, a brilliant stroke of win: why not format it in JSON? Then in my log parser I could just json_decode it! As far as I know there are no tricks to make Apache do this for you, so really all we have to do is define a custom log format that happens to look like JSON.

He includes the "LogFormat" line you'll need to add to your Apache configuration to make it log the JSON and a bit of PHP to help you pull in the file's contents and parse each line.

Today I looked for a replacement for my old jspanserializer.js script that I can't even remember where I found anymore. Turns out that I wont have to either, I can forget it. From now on I'll use jQuery JSON instead.

A code example is included to show the simplicity.