Thanks for the good feedback. I took some of your comments
and incorporated them into a new version and expanded on
some ideas as well.
For example, the reason I constructed the $date and $hostname
into a single variable was so that I could put a different
label on each entry. With the %entries hash, you can now
setup different pattern matches and the corresponding log
entry.
I left it doing the hostname lookup everytime simply because
every sane web server administrator has hostname lookups for
access turned off, leaving that variable empty.
If I were cruel, I'd have it send SERVER_ADMIN an email
everytime it got a REMOTE_HOST variable. :)