Mint
- January 13, 2006
- No Comments
I recently posted about being invited to Measure Map. While I like some of the features, it feels like it’s lacking something. It’s almost too dumbed down for my taste. And it’s getting kind of sluggish. I would have to wait upwards of 30 seconds to see graphs sometimes. Granted, it’s still in alpha stage right now, but little problems like that certainly don’t make you want to keep using it.
So I decided to try out the other “new kid” on the stats-tracking block called Mint. It was created by Shaun Inman, a very talented Web developer. It isn’t free, but it only costs $30 for each domain you want to track. I went ahead and bought a license to track chrisruzin.net stats.
It was a cinch to install. It took maybe five minutes and I was up and running. Like, Measure Map, Mint requires you to stick a little line of JavaScript in your templates. Actually, Mint requires one line of code. Measure Map requires several lines of code.
At first glance, Mint is pretty basic, but presented very well. It tracks page views, search terms, referrers, visits, etc. It’s very easy to set preferences and disable/enable the various “Peppers”, or modules, that make Mint work. In fact, third-party Peppers are what make Mint so much better than Measure Map.
I’ve gathered a small list of Peppers I’ve downloaded, installed and found useful:
- Download Counter by Steve Smith
- Referrer Rollup by Scott McMillin
- XXX Strong Mint by Nathan Kunicki
- Session Tracker by Beau Collins
- Outclicks by Andrew Sutherland
- Fresh View by Kyle Rove
- Trends by Brett DeWoody & Ronald Heft
- Sparks! by Colby Makowski
If you use Mint, leave a comment on what you think of it. If you know of any other really cool Peppers, leave a comment letting me know what it does and where to get it.
Since Mint’s Peppers are written in PHP, I think I’ll try my hand at creating one that hooks into the ExpressionEngine backend of my site to give me some really useful information. Once I get something actually fleshed out and working, I’ll post about it.