Variable Fragment

As I set up my blog I want to post my minireviews of different components that I find useful. After a brief stint with Google Analytics I’ve convinced myself to buy Mint.

First, a word about how web analytics works. There are really two different classes:

1. Log parsers. Your site keeps logs of visitor information in standard log files. There are many packages out there which read those logs and prepare reports. The information they can extract is limited by the kind of data that happens to be logged. A popular example would be AWStats.
2. Javascript triggered loggers which interrogate the visitor for additional information and save those data to a SQL database. Examples here would be Google Analytics and reinvigorate. Generally this second option provides you with much more information than the first, but the data are all collected by (for example) Google, stored and analyzed by google, and presented back to you by Google. The examples listed are free to the web site owner, but have a cost in that you are essentially trading away your user’s browsing habit information. This may or may not be a concern for you.

Now back to Mint. Functionally, Mint falls into the second category in that it collects additional information from your users and stores it in a SQL database but with two key differences. First, Mint is a PHP software package that you buy for a one-time price of $30 per domain (sub-domains are included in the main domain license) and install it on your hosting in the /mint subdirectory. So it is running on your own server, and you own the data. Note that you also need to provide it with a SQL database to store data, but for most hosting companies this is a 10 second process to set up a new database, and it will happily coexist on an existing database if you prefer not to create another.

The second key point about Mint is that the presentation of information is dramatically better than Google Analytics, which is my point of reference. With Google Analytics I’m continually frustrated by trying to locate the information that I’m interested in by digging through their submenus. Mint presents a very attractive single page data sheet containing all of the information that interests me. And since you host it all yourself the data is current up to that moment, unlike Google Analytics which lags by half a day or more.

A third nice advantage of Mint is that it can also track RSS feeds as well, which Google Analytics can’t do.

Google analytics is probably more appropriate for someone who is actually running adwords campaigns for the sake of its greater integration with Google’s servies, but for me it’s terrible interface and lack of ready information availability makes Mint a clear winner, even at $30. And really, $30 is the price of a new hardback book, and you are supporting well designed, extensible software written by a single guy, so how can you go wrong?

To give you a flavor for what it’s about check out the pictures below, or just go to these two live demos (default panes, and some nice third party panes) to see it in action. Be sure to click on the various headings in each information pane to see the charts.

A final point to help out any WordPress users is that there are two WordPress plugins out there that will allow you to fully integrate Mint into your site without the need to edit any templates or PHP yourself.
WP-Mint will automatically insert the correct PHP into all of your documents without the need to alter your template files, making it easily reversable.
The Mint Bird Feeder Mod alters your RSS, RSS2 and Atom feeds so that those statistics are tracked by the first-party Mint plugin called Bird Feeder.