Have a Mint
Shaun Inman released Mint well over a year ago and I've only just caved in and purchased a copy. I never felt it was worth the $30 when so many other free alternatives were available. However, one thing I've discovered is that I like stats. I like them very much. As a result of all the rave reviews I've heard elsewhere, I decided to pay for a copy myself.
As it turns out, Mint is pretty darned cool and is visually appealing with it's green and grey. (Seriously, you can never go wrong with those colours!) It's also quite flexible with its Pepper (aka plug-in) system.
Handy Bookmarklets
Being the lazy guy that I am, I came up with a couple handy bookmarkets:
Refresh All
The first is a simple "refresh all" button. It'll simply take the active tab from each panel and refresh it.
javascript:(function(){ var els = SI.CSS.select('.active');for(var i=0;i<els.length;i++)els[i].onclick() })();Auto-Refresh All
If you're overly obsessive (like me) and like to keep your mint window open 24/7, then I recommend using the auto-refresh button. Click this button once you've loaded the main mint window and it'll automatically refresh the panels every 15 minutes. If you want shorter or longer refresh times, just modify the large number near the end of this script (currently 900000).
javascript:void(setInterval(function(){ var els = SI.CSS.select('.active');for(var i=0;i<els.length;i++)els[i].onclick() },900000));Either of these could probably be turned into a Pepper to be a little more integrated but it's more effort than I was willing to put into it for such small scripts. If somebody feels like taking on that task, by all means, go ahead! Happy Mint'ing!
Conversation
I clicked the link in our AIM chat, and ten seconds in nearly laughed myself to tears to find out you already have it auto-refreshing. Well, now that you are hooked I suppose its about time for me to go get my copy, eh?
You can't call yourself lazy for inventing some great tools for everyone to use! Alright, you can call yourself lazy, but you sure are generous! Thanks for the bookmarklets. I'm overly obsessive as well, so the Auto-Refresh All will come in handy.
Also got minted only a month ago (way too late now that I look at it) and came to this conclusion right here: mint is the greatest.
Tnx for the bookmarklets Jonathan!
I caved a few months ago and bought Mint. It took me awhile to justify the price too since I also use other stats that work very well.
I'm pretty impressed with Mint, though I still wonder if it was worth all the hype. Never the less, still a good product.
Hey Snook, I'm interested in Mint also, but I'm kind of wondering what it offers (or how it does some things better, or worse) when compared to Google Analytics. I think I saw in one of your recent posts that you're using Google's service as well, and I'd like to know what you think of the two in comparison. $30 is not too much to pay for Mint, so that's not really the reason I haven't jumped in yet. Like you, I've always thought that the free alternatives probably suit my needs just fine.
Also, any word yet on whether or not you'll be able to make it to Web Directions next month?
Jonathan: the biggest issue I was/am having with GA is the delay in seeing results. Plus, I find some of the referrer stats okay for large results but hard to really get a sense of things for small referrers (like, one or two clickthroughs a day).
Being able to 'watch' pages is nice as I can see if particular pages are doing well (like, if they get dugg). That, in combination with the Trends pepper, I can see how things are doing.
Mint by itself, I'm not sure would be enough for me. Some of the stuff I can do with Analytics is nice, too.
As for Web Directions, just working on arranging a flight, trying to coordinate it with my work schedule but I should be there. :)
Agreed. Just wrote about Mint in December. My conclusion was:
(BTW, looking forward to seeing you again at SXSW.)
Welcome to the club Jonathan! When I first got Minted, I was addicted to the live stats. I love the fact that I can see activity while it's happening!
Good to see that you finally caved in. ^^
Also, for those who are curious, I've currently got mint configured for client mode.
Michael: SXSW should be fun, definitely look forward to seeing you there!
Mint is such a fantastic tool / app, and is as essential to the beginning of one's day as a morning cup of coffee. Glad to see you finally joined the bandwagon!
That's great that you'll be at WDN! It'd be great to meet you in person.
Mint is a great application, thanks for reminding me that I still haven't reconfigured Mint since I switched hosts. ;-)
I recently blogged about this as well.
Mint is a great little piece of software that I am extremely addicted to! I often ask myself how I lived without it for so long. I kept thinking that I didn't need it, it was overrated, not worth the money. I was so totally wrong!
I imagine that the mint interface must match your site pretty well!
Most stats programs don't give me the feedback that I'm after, which is mainly the exact browse-path that a visitor goes through. I've resorted to going through my raw server logs for this information. It helps me get a sense of what someone is interested in, including the time it takes them to load the page, browser, etc.
From the demo/client page, it doesn't seem like I can get an idea of this through Mint. Your comment about being to "watch" a page sounds like the closest thing. What does this mean?
Jeff: the watch feature just allows me to see how many hits I get on a particular page. With additional Pepper, though, you can do a bit more. There's a Trends Pepper where you can see a bar graph day-over-day to see the performance of watched pages (along with popular, new, and old pages).
For tracking browse-paths, there are a couple Pepper for that as well. XXXStrong Mint, for example, tracks IP addresses, does dns lookups, and let's you see the page history of a particular address. It's cool in that you can see people coming back days after checking out stuff. In this case though, it only lets you view individual users and not aggregate. I believe there's an aggregate Pepper available to do this but I haven't tried it.
Snook, not sure if you've updated your bookmarklets for Mint 2 but now there's an official Pepper based on this idea.