September 6th, 2005
Refreshing Minty goodness
No, this isn’t a shameless plug and No, I’m not getting any ‘favours’ from Shaun to write about Mint. Here’s the thing.
The standard stats package that ships as part of Dreamhost’s offering is good enugh, although way too complicated for keeping track of over the days. Now, you have to understand I’m not a referrals nut. Expression Engine has a built in Referrals module which is handy in keeping track of things, but it only gives you limited information. Mint on the other hand is looking very good for my needs.
I bought Mint a couple of hours ago and here’s what I think so far…
One of things that bothers me about Expression Engine and my current host, Dreamhost, is that between the two of them I’ve never managed to get my stats package from working correctly. This is due to me using Mod-rewrite in my htaccess file to get rid of the /index.php/ that Expression Engine has as standard in it’s url structure.
How does it look?
Nice. No surprise there really, Shaun is a spot on designer. Only one minor gripe, I had to enlarge the default font size but I think that may be due to my rather high resolution I’m running at work. So, shades of green and a masterclass in legible table design.
How does it work?
Mint tracks a whole bunch of things — Referrals, User Agents, Pages etc. and does it all in one Browser window with some AJAX goodness for refreshing. It was easy to configure, I think I had it downloaded and up and running within 2 minutes. Basically you download it, upload it to your server and then add a line of code to the pages you want to track. Those familiar with Shaun’s previous application, Shortstat, will be right at home.
Worth the cash?
I think so, but my stats package has never worked correctly, so a one off payment of $30 is well worth it. Plus, Shaun has built an API, Pepper, which hopefully over the coming months will be used to enhance the offering of Mint.
Overall
You can probably gather that my initial thoughts are good. Mint has been hyped a lot over the past few months (maybe too much), but so far, for me anyway, it’s exceeding expectation.
Mint certainly seems—from what’s been said about it on so, so many sites in the last couple of days—the right tool for my particular job (tracking referrals on my own site). That said, it would have been nice to be able to try it out without having to shell out the $30 (which isn’t a huge amount of money, but being a student, I can’t just go paying that kind of money out just on speculation). Unfortunately, the demo has been temporarily disabled.
Well Benedict — try Shaun’s Shortstat. It’s free and has pretty much the same functionality I believe (although it won’t block refferrer spam).
Alternatively, if you want an all round, feature rich stats programme — try awstats.
That’s also free.
I tried awstats, once upon a time, and didn’t have much luck getting it to work with my server. It might be worth trying it again, but honestly, it’s not that I’m not prepared to pay—I am. I’d just like the opportunity to evaluate first. This is why things like free Backpack accounts are great: they let you try out the service.
Obviously there’s a very different business model at work here, given that it’s a locally hosted application and I imagine that Shaun (rightly, I would judge) probably thinks that people would, in the main, simply install and use Mint without paying for it. Given that, it’s an entirely reasonable position. I just wish that the demo were working, because with the near-uniform positive reaction from those who have actually tried it, it seems that it might well be worth the money. :)
It certainly looks nice, but other than the API (which I’d never use) and the bookmarking of specific pages, I don’t see what it offers that Webalizer doesn’t (referrer spam is easily dealt with — just use grep :).
That’s the thing though Paul, I couldn’t use Webalizer because of all the htaccess problems I was having. Also I think Mint has a offers something different in that it’s purposefully trimmed down and more user friendly.
I think investing in it at this stage, with a view to Shaun having the money to develop Pepper, is a good move. I’m so sick of really good open-source applications being shelved because of lack of time or money. I don’t mind investing fifteen quid in a platform I know will grow into somethign more over the coming months.
I’m surprised about that, I use Rewriterules fairly extensively on several of my sites and Webalizer has no problems generating stats for them.
However, if Mint is only ?15 then I guess it’s probably worth a spin for you. Personally I can’t afford it because $30 * 8 sites (and 20 domains, each of which will eventually host at least one site) is rather expensive. :)
The effectiveness of a well-designed GUI can’t be understated. Feed the same raw info to two different stats packages, and the one with the superior interface will get my business, whether it costs money or not. I’ll be trying the demo as soon as I’m able, but I have the feeling I’ll be putting down my $30/?15 pretty soon. One of the Expression Engine developers hinted he might like to see how it can be integrated into Expression Engine (maybe via a module?)
I had a look at that thread Tim, not sure about infringment of copyright there with regards to Shaun’s app being ‘put’ somewhere else. It would be great to have similiar functionality shipped as a module for EE though.
Totally agree with you about GUI too.
I don’t think Paul means embedding it into Expression Engine. I think he means to enable it to be accessed via the control panel, whilst still requiring the user to have a valid license for Mint.I presume this would be possible with the API (although I haven’t looked at the details of the API or the license.)
I have Mint running on my site, too and I am really happy with it. Especially the MacOS Widget is a really nice thing.
Looking forward to more usefull plugins in the future…
I’m very interested in this application but am also waiting for the demo to be re-opened. Also, how does exactly does the license work? I have 3 sites, but they are on the same server, do I pay one time or 3 times. What if the sites are all under the same domain?
A number of people have setup demo versions of mint ont heir sites.
If you want to check it out try this one:
http://www.wackomenace.co.uk/mint-demo-live/