It's the buzz of the day in the blogosphere. Some say it's overhyped, some say it's too expensive, others say it's the best thing since sliced bread while yet other people have no idea what all the fuss is about. There have been many (p)reviews on Mint by a whole gang of (semi) famous webloggers that have seriously heated up the hype about Mint over the last couple of days. Then why the hell am I writing this review? Who am I anyway compared to these celebrities?

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The Hype

Mint. I guess everyone in the entire blogosphere will agree that Mint is the most gorgeous looking site stats application they've ever seen. The feature set is limited but what's available looks good. VERY good. Since hardly anyone on this planet will disagree on this issue I guess I don't have to write about what Mint looks like. You can read the praise all over the internet. The important question however is: Does Mint live up to the hype? In this review I try to take a somewhat different approach than a lot of earlier reviews did. Read on to find out whether I succeeded.

Installing Mint

Installing Mint went slightly less trouble-free than I expected. The first thing that went bonkers was caused by a false assumption made by yours truly. I'd never ever used curl in PHP myself but I assumed it was something rather standard. Why would mr. Inman require it if this wasn't the case? So there I went, I unpacked Mint, set up the database and filled out the nicely designed form it presented me with. I pressed the button to finish installation and there it was: white nothingness. Absolutely nothing appeared on my screen. No text, no fancy graphic, no error message, no nothing. Of course I didn't expect mr. Inman to ship a broken product. As a first troubleshooting effort I decided to run the Mint compatibility test. Quickly I found out that I didn't have the curl extension to PHP installed. Being a developer myself I managed to create a workaround for this problem ^*. I was finally running Mint!

Setting your domain right

After waiting for a while for some stats to gather I started playing around with Mint in it's full glory. Oh no! The links to my pages turned out to be broken! When registering Mint it asked me to enter the domain on which I intended to run it. In my book this should be i-marco.nl. Bad idea. All links in my Mint installation now contain url's without the www part, causing them all to be broken. I guess there's an issue to be resolved here. I wasn't really able to fix this in any way so I guess I'll have to mail Shaun to get it resolved and I fear I won't be the only one.

Done with the bad stuff! The problems described in the above aren't really big issues in my book. It's what you get with a first release quite often. I know all about this in respect to my own Pivot Blacklist releases. It's a quite complex piece of software and quite often I miss some small issues no matter how careful I test it before packaging it. I'm sure these startup problems will be resolved real soon now.

Update: Shaun explained I had to uncheck the 'Trim www and index.* from urls' option under Global in the preferences pane. This box was checked by default so you might want to take a look at it immediately after installation. It fixed the problem with the broken URLs.

Functionality

Mint is a stats viewer but it's different from others. Apart from it's gorgeous looks it's also rather limited when it comes to the amount of features it offers. While this may sound bad it really isn't, at least not to me. The most important features of Mint are:

• Counters for total amount of visits and unique amount of visits per hour, day, week, month and year
• A rolling list of referrers in three flavours: newest unique, most recent and repeat referrers
• A rolling list of requested pages in three flavours: most popular, most recent and 'watched'
• A list of search phrases with which people came in through search engines
• 'Pepper' plugin mechanism enabling 3rd parties to add functionality to Mint. Currently it comes with two extra plugins: User Agent 007 which lists the browsers your visitors used and a plugin that lists local searches. Unfortunately this last one only works when your search form uses GET, which isn't the case on my blog.

I might have missed some features but these are the most important ones. I'm not going to dive deeply into them because many others have already done so. As you can see it's not all that much. However: it's enough for many people including yours truly. What's there is good, very good.

Eek! Javascript!

I guess one of the biggest controverses regarding Mint is the fact that it uses Javascript to log visitors. This has advantages as well as disadvantages. The disadvantages are the fact that visitors without javascript will not be logged. This means people who have disabled javascript won't appear in your stats as well as people using Lynx or other browsers that don't even HAVE javascript. Another group of 'visits' that isn't logged by Mint are (search) bots. You won't see how many times GoogleBot, MSNBot or any other bot comes sniffing around through your pages. This last disadvantage brings us to the great advantage of this technique. If it doesn't log search spider bots it will also ignore those pesky referrer spammers. They use filthy pieces of software such as PRStorm or custom scripts that all have one thing in common: They don't run Javascript.

The javascript approach means that you will probably miss 1 or 2% of your stats. However it also means you will probably miss 100% of your referrer spam. Whether you're willing to sacrifice the 1 or 2% in order to have a spam-free stats page is entirely up to you. I think it's perfectly acceptible to most people but I can also very well understand it isn't to some other people. The fact that Shaun choose to implement the javascript solution gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling because I came up with the same idea and improved ShortStat with it at the time. Later on I refined the technique and even implemented variation on it that completely killed trackback spam. I guess it's not hard to see I'm all in favour of the javascript route. It's a shame we have to do this but in the fight against pesky spammers sacrifices have to be made unfortunately.

Pricing

When Shaun Inman announced the fact that Mint wasn't going to be free he quickly added to this that it wasn't going to be very expensive. However quite some people consider it (too) expensive. While to me personally Mint is worth the $30 I paid for it I can see this might be too much for some people. A slightly lower price tag such as $15 or $20 would probably result in more gross sales. Of course I'm not an economist but the first signs indicate this is indeed the case. Another issue is the fact that a license is required for each separate domain you want to use it on. To me personally this is a bit too much. Luckily for me I'm only interested in using Mint on this website but I seriously doubt I'd go as far as purchasing extra licenses for my other sites. So is it worth the money? I consider the answer to this question to be a definite yes when it comes to my needs for this site. For people on a tight budget or people with multiple sites who want to use the same stats software on all their sites it may very well be overpriced. It all depends on your point of view.

Concluding thoughts

Mint Works for me. It does exactly what I already loved about ShortStat: giving me a quick, real-time view on what's going on with my site while being easy on the eye. I'll admit it, I'm a sucker for good looking stuff. If I want ultra accurate long-term statistics I can have my Apache logs crunched by heavy stats analyzers but honestly, I don't need it. That's why Mint fit's my needs just perfectly.

Mint is likeable. It's drop dead gorgeous. The 'marketing campaign' behind it was excellent, the website to promote it looks stunning and I haven't experienced so much buzz over a relatively simple application in ages. In fact I don't even remember something like this at all. All together this is an excellent effort. Shaun Inman created the buzz and delivered a product that many people are dying to have. A comment by Pierce on Kevin Leitch's blog illustrates this feeling beautifully. The product Mint is nice and could very well evolve into something REALLY nice in the future, especially because of the open 'Pepper' plugin architecture with which 3rd party developers can add functionality to it. The hype around Mint is even nicer, if not just friggin' amazing. Just like the product itself, a carefully crafted experience surrounding it with a true aura of success.

Wanna have a mint too? It's up to you!

^*UPDATE: The cURL issues have been resolved by Shaun in a 1.01 update. No more cURL needed!