Mint: A Fresh Look at Your Site

I must have been looking the other way when Shaun Inman introduced Mint last year as the successor to his ShortStats web usage stats freeware. I can see why it was such a success… Mint has a gorgeous, fresh look to it, but its main strength comes from its “Peppers” plugin API. Mint comes with a couple default “Peppers”, and there are dozens of free Peppers now available that cover the range of statistics webmasters need when monitoring their site’s usage. Each Pepper is configurable, as is the whole Mint system, from an Admin page that’s accessible through login. You can choose to make your stats publicly available as well. Mint costs $30 for the activation code and PHP pages that set up your MySQL tables, collect, and interpret the data. All the major blogging systems now have plugins that make installing Mint a breeze (although it’s very easy even without those). A forum on the havamint.com website is very helpful for newbies, and the Peppermint Tea site is where you go to discover all the available Peppers. Mint requires a Unix, or Unix-like system (including Mac OS X) and does not run on Windows. I also have a Google Analytics account, and frankly, even though I love that service, I find Mint to be much more useful for the kinds of data I want to track, like referrers, searches, top pages, browser and OS data, visits, and errors. In addition to the website, there are also Dashboard and Yahoo widgets available for quick desktop viewing of visit data.