Make Your Stats Minty Fresh With MINT

If you aren't using Sean Inman's Mint to track your stats, you are missing out. It fills in all the holes you find in other stat applications, from the ubiquitous Webalyzer to online solutions like SiteMeter and StatCounter, and it does it while looking fantastic. I downloaded it to try out in December 2007 and I haven't looked back - I love it. It has now replaced all other stat programs for me for daily use.

Mint uses JavaScript, PHP and MySql in tandem to bring you the freshest stats for your web site or blog. It works in Opera, iPhones, Safari, FireFox, and Internet Explorer for PC. I use it in FireFox on my MacBook.

One of the nice things about Mint in the support network. It is a dual support system made up of Sean, the program creator, and the other users of the program. You can get help in the forums, which is often immediate and comprehensive, and you can get help directly from Sean. I had a small hiccup when I first installed Mint, and Sean and the other users were on top of things immediately. That level of support is wonderful.

Mint has an open API that enables its loyal user to make add ons for it. Sean also creates add ons. These add ons are called Pepper. The add ons created by Sean Inman are "Official Pepper" and the others are "Third Party Pepper". The Pepper increases thefunctionality of Mint ten fold. In default mode Mint is fairly comprehensive, but many of the Pepper add features you didn't even know you wanted until you had them.

One of my favorite Pepper is the Bird Feeder. This gives you a way to track your stats that come from feeds. It catches everything, and even allows you to categorize feed types with trackable prefixes and sort them by destination and other things. I love it - I had no idea so many readers were coming from RSS and Atom feeds until I installed Mint with Bird Feeder.

You can add Pepper to track Location, down to the city the user is in. You can follow people back to their sites and track whether they return. You can even unmask hidden visitors using other Pepper add ons. Crushes and Secret Crushes tell you who is using your bandwidth. You also get Search traffic results, Seeds, Pages viewed, Visitors, Referrers and more, each in their own neatly organized pane for fast viewing.

Mint is fast, easy to install and more comprehensive and expandable than any other stat tracker I've used yet. Sure, I still have Webalyzer on my cpanel of my blog, it comes with the hosting. I haven't opened it since I installed Mint. In fact, I haven't checked SiteMeter either sincer installing Mint. At $30 per installation (per site) Mint is a bargain. I highly recommend it.

TECH SPECS (direct from the horse's mouth on Mint's support pages):

Skills

Installing and maintaining Mint requires a basic familiarity with HTML, FTPfollowing written instructions. and

Server

Mint was developed and beta tested on various Linux servers running Apache with a MySQL database (3.x and up), and PHP scripting (4.2.3 and up). PHP can be run as an Apache module or PHP-as-CGI. Mint requires an internet connection for Activation and weekly update checks and to be eligible for support. Please check with your host if you are unsure about any of these requirements before purchasing. Individual Pepper may have their own additional requirements.

Browser

In order to view Mint you should be using a modern browser with support for cookies, transparent PNGs, modern DOM scripting (including XMLHTTPRequest) with good support for CSS 2. Safari, Opera or Firefox, all free, are highly recommended. Mint 2 introduces full support for Internet Explorer PC. IE Mac will not be supported.

In order to record hits Mint requires JavaScript be enabled. This may be an issue for some but was a necessary trade-off that prevents Mint's results from being skewed by non-human spiders, crawlers and referrer-spam bots.