Mint: It’s Good and Good For You
September 5, 2005
Face it. If you have a web site, there’s probably just a bit—or a whole lot—of narcissism going on there inside your head. Whether it’s for you, your paintball club, or your grandmother’s dot-com afghan superstore, nobody goes to the trouble of setting up, designing, launching and supporting a web site if you aren’t convinced you can offer something no one else does.
It’s no different for me. So, when Shaun Inman told me about Mint I was thrilled to have a chance to give it a whirl. After using it for a few months now, I’ve given up my unhealthy addiction to Urchin and my Textpattern logs. It appeals to the narcissist in me by giving me quick, thorough, and uncluttered access to the information I want: namely, how many people are schlepping to my site, and how they’re getting here.
You’ll be hearing a lot about Mint’s features over the next week or so, but I’d like to talk about two features that are particularly fantastic to me: smart referrer grouping and search referrals.
When I used Textpattern logs, way too many of my referrers were from my own web site. This was because, when you spread a site out among several subdomains (for example, photo.iammattthomas.com) each click between pages was recorded as a referrer. Mint changes all that just by clicking “Don’t count local subdomains as Referrers.” You’re done. It’s also smart enough to know that www.haveamint.com, haveamint.com and haveamint.com/index.php are all the same site, and groups them all as one entry in your list of referrers.
The most fun feature to me, though, is Searches. Searches gives you a running tally of the searches people are performing that are leading them to your site.
Rather than having to decipher query strings in simple referrer logs or drill down ten pages deep in your bloated logfile analyzer, Mint gives you a quick look at both your most recent and most popular search terms. This can provide you with information that can be entertaining, enlightening, or downright disturbing as you can see above.
Mint is available now for the low, low price of $30, so head on down to haveamint.com and start enjoying it yourself.
But don’t take my word for it; check out the sites below for more tasty glimpses into Mint.
- Mike Davidson—Mint: The Flavor of the Month
- Jeff Croft—Mint: Better than Girl Scout Cookies
- Keegan Jones—Mint: Fresh ‘N Yummy
- Jon Hicks—Pimp my Mint
- Jason Santa Maria—Pepper Makes Mint Better
- Kevin Cornell—Dr. Inman’s Mint
- Rob Weychert—Mint: A Stats Odyssey
“crest whitestrips semen?”
Oh, that’s hot.
Indeed, I was obviously not the only one put off by the taste of the whitening gel.
More to the point, though, Mint let me find that out.
Oh dear. I can hear the stampede of statswhores in the distance already. Which is good, because that means if I start out now I might get there first.
Any news on the cost?
Hah! Such a sneakily clever marketing campaign to date; Do you really think they’ll give that info up beforehand? Pfft. Haven’t you ever been to an Apple Store?
indeed the marketing campaign is just wow
Ordered :p
30 BUCKS?!!??!! That’s absolutely, ridiculously freaking reasonable.
Yep, $30 ain’t bad for that tasty bit of kit.
But I always thought Shortstat was rather tasty too. $30 seems a lot just for a slicker interface. Beautifully done though.
[...] iammattthomas.com [...]
[...] Fair play if you haven’t seen it before and like I said if you had mint ver 1 you might understand where I am coming from. Shaun inman has changed the design for version 2 slightly but it was the first thing that came to me anyways thats why I put it there and mint is quite well known to a few people anyways. Although I admit its not identical in any way it did remind me totally of it maybe its just me. Its just coincidence so ignore it fella! Jason Santa Maria | Pepper Makes Mint Better Mint: Green Means Go // ShaunInman.com Rob Weychert | Editorials: “Mint: A Stats Odyssey” Matt Thomas » Mint: It’s Good and Good For You [...]