A good way to go about tracking an application?

I've coded something that unexpectedly gathered a lot of interest on Reddit, so I'm attempting to add simple analytics on it before I finish it. I'm wondering if someone who has done this stuff before could give a few tips?
I tested sending a few events but it looks like they weren't designed to be the main tracking feature.

Should I be using pageviews or events (eg. for script started)?
How do I track time spent running (when I'm unable to simply send a number of seconds on script exit)?
Would it be a good idea to send an update every few minutes or so, or would that skew the results and make it harder to read?

Sending pageviews like "start", "time/(seconds)", "total/(program)/(seconds)" have come to mind, or is there a much better way I'm missing?

Cheers

 

Sorry, Peter. This just might be a little bit too complicated for me. I hope you get some good advice from the rest of the members in this forum.

 

I personally think that you should use events.