3 September 06

Review: Mint

I admit that I’m a complete stats junkie. I can’t make it through the day without at least checking my site stats at least ten times. Not that they go up by any significant amount or not that I get a high rate of traffic – I just like analysing statistics. I think this may be due to my mathematics background, having been brought up on a ton of maths-based school and university courses. Maybe I’m overly analytic or it’s some very mild sort of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but I enjoy finding patterns in numbers. This analytical mind I have is probably why I enjoy coding so much.

Before I bought Mint, I had four areas of statistics to check; Google Analytics, Technorati, Feedburner and my Textpattern log files. This is a lot of stat checking. A while back, I took a count of how many times I checked each of these sites in a day, albeit an atypical day due to the fact I didn’t want to totally worry myself. The results were Txp 10, Technorati 5, Feedburner and Google 4 times each. Yep, I was checking different stats a total of 23 times in a day I was purposely trying not to look at stats.

When I first came across Mint, the stats package built by Shaun Inman, I was pre-blog era Rik, so wasn’t too interested in parting $30 for something I wouldn’t use too much. Over the months, I kept hearing largely good things about it – I wasn’t sure it was fanboy overenthusiam or genuine praise, so I took the plunge and impulse-bought Mint.

My first impression was that it was incredibly easy to set up. In fact, I managed to pay, download, install and set preferences within fifteen minutes. My second impression (after a few hours waiting for the page views to roll in) was the lack of features. Compared to the free Google Analytics, the basic installation of Mint is decidely lacking. This is where Peppers come in.

Pepper makes Mint better. Mint has a stable plug-in API which allows independent developers to extend its base feature set with plugins called Pepper.

So basically Peppers are just a wanky, pretensious name for mainly free plug-ins for Mint, but this is where Mint comes into its own. It has a relatively small but rabid bunch of developers building useful, easy-to-install Peppers for Mint. Without this architechure for plug-ins for Mint, it would not be worth $30, in fact, it would be hard to see it survive as just a good looking hosted version of Statcounter.

Talking about the looks, you can’t help but notice Mint’s design. I think its design has contributed heavily to Mint’s success. Anyone can make a reasonable looking design, but to really capture people’s attention, it needs a striking look which is what Mint achieves. But this is all superficial really as it’s a stat counter that only the buyer will see – I didn’t pay for a nice stylesheet.

The main question is would I pay for Mint again? Well, honestly, probably not. I think Mint on it’s own is definitely not worth the money – however, Mint with its Peppers are much more worth it. It goes to show how valuable a good community are to a product.

Related Links
Mint official site
Peppermint Tea
The Mint Forum

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