minty freshness
I got sucked in to some cunning hype last night: trapped by a circular series of blog postings advocating a particularly nifty blog stats package called Mint. I ended up buying it. And it’s very good. I actually don’t regret the purchase at all.
Like many other website owners, I’m intensely interested in the numbers of my readers, what they are reading, when and with what. My host has an install of Urchin, which is OK, but I just never seemed to use it enough. I’ve tried a couple of other packages, most notably BBClone, which I simply could not make work.
Mint is a one page screen consisting of a series of very pretty panels, each of which (through some Ajax goodness) can refresh independently of each other without having to reload the entire page. There’s a page hit panel, and others for referrers, browser and platform stats.
And so now I know all I need to know about how many and when. (Answer: not really a lot and only sometimes.)
A screenshot from this afternoon is here. (Checking in recently, I’ve had a “massive” 115 unique users in the last 24 hours. Woo hoo!)
Things I’d like to see would be some sort of count of downloads of my RSS feed, and some idea as to the geographic location of my visitors. Given that there appears to be quite a nice plugin API, I can probably just wait a little while and see what emerges.
[And in the meantime I can use Mint to see if my blatant linking to all those other blogs above gets me any return traffic: as they’re using Mint too they’ll spot my link to them right away…]
Jeff Croft
8 September 2005, 02:05 #
Indeed, I saw your link to me right away, thanks to Mint. :)
MT
8 September 2005, 02:10 #
Worked for me!
Alan
8 September 2005, 07:38 #
It’s working!
Just a bit more of this, and I can start laughing at the puny traffic of Slashdot. :-)
Martha
8 September 2005, 09:52 #
The problem with a tool like this for your valued reader is that I can’t make your website show up on my Sage thingy, so I check it everytime I check Sage. I look like a total stalker.
Well, perhaps I am a total stalker. Cyber stalking doesn’t have the same fear factor as standing outside your house.
Alan
8 September 2005, 13:20 #
Luckily there are two counts: one for Total number of visits, which will increase every time you do your Mark Chapman impression, and Unique, which won’t increment. Mint puts a cookie in your browser to that it knows you for next time.
I wonder why Sage won’t work for you? I’ve got it working here at work…
Martha
8 September 2005, 15:31 #
Probably because I haven’t tried very hard, and there isn’t an obvious little orange square in the corner. I need things very simple.
Alan
8 September 2005, 18:37 #
In the Sage panel, try the magnifying glass button. That will attempt to detect any feeds from the page you are currently on. It should come up with two options for my site.
I find that at the moment for Sage RSS works better than Atom, due to some unfathomable peculiarity of half-pie’s present configuration.
Martha
8 September 2005, 19:30 #
Brilliant, thanks Alan, it seems to have worked.
Every other time I’ve added you I get the exclamation mark.
Although you’ll miss all the hits – your daily count will go down heeeaaaps.
Ben
8 September 2005, 20:13 #
Bye bye cookie :-)
Ben.
llew
8 September 2005, 21:39 #
Heh… works really well….
Alan
8 September 2005, 22:28 #
Ben: you can put your tinfoil helmet away now. (I’ve only just got rid of mine, to be honest.)
Llew: yes. Seek, and ye shall find.
llew
9 September 2005, 10:05 #
The thing is… I didn’t find… your next post confirmed what Wanda thought she remembered…
Alan
9 September 2005, 15:47 #
OK then: Seek, and ye shall be found?
Patrick
12 September 2005, 23:18 #
Ok, so you got me into it to.
I paid for it, installed it, and it seems to be working.
Oddly enough I’m finding odd things about where the search engines place my pages. Very interesting.
Alan
12 September 2005, 23:40 #
Glad you think it’s interesting too.
I’ve now installed a couple of plugins: Outclicks to see which links visitors are clicking out on, and XXX Strong Mint which allows me to associate the IP addresses of visits with their trail through the site. Cue even more obsessive stats-gazing.
And it’s amazing the things that search engines think one’s site is relevant for…
Patrick
13 September 2005, 11:29 #
My RSS stat needs are provided by FeedBurner for now.
XXX Strong Mint is indeed interesting, though I’ve not yet tried Outclicks. Maybe I’ll chuck it in anyway. Oh heck, why not.
Patrick
13 September 2005, 18:52 #
Actually, Error Tracker (http://errortracker.xhtmled.com/) is possibly the icing on the cake for me… I finally found a use for 410 Gone! (I, long ago, had content at soapbox.co.nz/content/blah, but that content no longer exists, so I now return a proper status code)