After first becoming aware of Shaun Inman’s latest website statistics package, called Mint in September, I have been debating about switching from Shortstat, his previous offering. The new tool costs $30 per domain and the demo movie was really too small to see much detail.
Recently however, I noticed that there was now a viewable demo site, and I saw that Mint was good. Very good. So last evening around 9:00 I took the plunge and purchased a copy for this domain. Setup is a snap: setup a MySQL database through your host provider’s web interface, plug the database connection values into the configuration file for Mint, upload the whole deal to your domain, and add a single line of JavaScript to each page you want to track. What could be simpler?
Within minutes I was already seeing traffic reported via Mint’s very slick interface and, thanks to a nifty “block my visits” cookie option, no worries about counting my hits. While some might question the use of JavaScript to trigger statistics collection is prevents referrer spam from inflating the counts artificially. Best of all there is an API for extending Mint called Pepper.
Nothing better than highly useful software with a well-developed UI, and an even better sense of humor.