Check for updates and monitor usage?

[lairdb]

So, I've written a small script to solve a small but persistent iTunes-for-Windows annoyance, that I know affects many people.

I'm inclined to release it to the world -- but it would be really nice if I could

- get a general sense of it's usage (without collecting any personal info), and

- notify users if there was an update.

These seem like things that somebody would have banged out libraries precisely to solve, but searching turned up only thread from 2008. Full marks to kimurtus in that thread, who provided a snippet of au3 and the corresponding server-side php that looks like a decent start -- but I'm surprised not to find this solved robustly and commonly.

Is my search-fu just weak today?

(As far as I've thought out what the ideal answer would look like for my app, it's a pretty minimal list.

- I would accumulate in the app a "triggered in the last 24 hours" rolling counter, probably as an hourly array. Since this is non-critical, I wouldn't bother persisting this across invocations.

- Every few hours, it would contact a server to push the last few hours of usage numbers to the, which would probably just keep a simple sum, allowing me to say "my script has helped 47 unique people, 879 times."

- A command-line flag would allow the user to defeat the reporting feature, if they wanted.

- Occasionally, perhaps as a part of the same contact, it would look for some sort of a message-to-users-of-version-xx, allowing me to cause "New version available, at foo.bar/baz!" to the users.)