Minty Fresh

After a long lull in my posting, I am sure that no one even cares: I have installed Mint, the fresh web statistic tracking program created by Shaun Inman. Although this site serves little more than my personal creative outlet for writing, thoughts, ideas, and exclamations, there is a wee bit of narcissism that follows the creation of a personal blog. As such, how can I tell if I am (not) popular? Eating a Mint, of course!

Mint intelligently collects and displays hits, unique visitors, referrers (minus the referral spam, of course), and much more. Mint replaces the venerable ShortStat, which I used since this site’s inception more than a year ago. I added an SVG chart to my copy of ShortStat that matched the look and feel and I am anxious to rework it as a plugin (called Pepper) for Mint.

At $30 per domain, Mint might be a little overkill for my site, but the scalability and logical, common sense approach to the data collection is right in line with my goals of ~~world domination~~ better data visibility in smart, open formats. SQL is a such a format, and Mint is the means to accessing that data. Did I mention that there is also a Mac OS X Tiger widget, aptly named Junior Mint?

The installation was more simple than I imagined. Change a few lines in the configuration file, upload the directory. I followed the installation prompts (site name, email, and password for authentication to haveamint.com presumably), copied the JavaScript line into the site files I wanted to track, and in seconds, I was staring at Sensory Output’s mint breath.

For all your linking pleasure, see these gushing accounts of the wonders of Mint. (Yes, by now, I am a Mint horror, too!)