No, this isn’t a shameless plug and No, I’m not getting any ‘favours’ from Shaun to write about Mint. Here’s the thing.

The standard stats package that ships as part of Dreamhost’s offering is good enugh, although way too complicated for keeping track of over the days. Now, you have to understand I’m not a referrals nut. Expression Engine has a built in Referrals module which is handy in keeping track of things, but it only gives you limited information. Mint on the other hand is looking very good for my needs.

I bought Mint a couple of hours ago and here’s what I think so far…

One of things that bothers me about Expression Engine and my current host, Dreamhost, is that between the two of them I’ve never managed to get my stats package from working correctly. This is due to me using Mod-rewrite in my htaccess file to get rid of the /index.php/ that Expression Engine has as standard in it’s url structure.

How does it look?

Nice. No surprise there really, Shaun is a spot on designer. Only one minor gripe, I had to enlarge the default font size but I think that may be due to my rather high resolution I’m running at work. So, shades of green and a masterclass in legible table design.

How does it work?

Mint tracks a whole bunch of things - Referrals, User Agents, Pages etc. and does it all in one Browser window with some AJAX goodness for refreshing. It was easy to configure, I think I had it downloaded and up and running within 2 minutes. Basically you download it, upload it to your server and then add a line of code to the pages you want to track. Those familiar with Shaun’s previous application, Shortstat, will be right at home.

Worth the cash?

I think so, but my stats package has never worked correctly, so a one off payment of $30 is well worth it. Plus, Shaun has built an API, Pepper, which hopefully over the coming months will be used to enhance the offering of Mint.

Overall

You can probably gather that my initial thoughts are good. Mint has been hyped a lot over the past few months (maybe too much), but so far, for me anyway, it’s exceeding expectation.