I was poking around in the python documentation the other day and discovered the logging module. I have to say that it is quite the cool module. It takes all the work out of putting together a logger, and it does it really well. I perused the documentation and checked out some examples, but I couldn't quite get it figured out well enough to work with it's SysLogHandler, which is usually my preferred method of logging. I did, however, find this nice little example that works perfectly:

http://scottbarnham.com/blog/2008/01/01/sysloghandler-not-writing-to-syslog-with-python-logging/