After reading on Paul Stamatiou’s About page that he thought Flickr (which I already use) and Mint were the best web inventions ever, I decided it was time that I finally took a good hard look at Mint.
I remember when it first came out, Mint was everywhere. The blogosphere pumped it so ungodly much that I could barely stand to think about it, much less look at what it actually did. Besides, I already had AWStats running on my server, and it was free!
What could Mint do that I was missing?
Well, I bit the bullet, dropped the $30, and installed Mint. The entire process was not only painless, it was quite interesting. Aside from manually needing to edit a config file, the installation was a piece of cake (really, couldn’t we at least *try* to write out the config file automagically, if we have permissions?). It was quite an attractive layout, very straight forward, and quickly over. I like how you get an authorization key and the software “phones home” to validate the domain and key. Sure it’s PHP and we could get around this, but I do have some honor, right?
So after running Mint for a few hours and playing around with it, here are the results:
The stats are straight-forward. There aren’t any frills, and aside from a pretty (and Ajax-ified) interface, it’s nothing revolutionary. AWStats offers me a tad more detail, but not in nearly as simple an interface. It was free, though…
I don’t really like AWStats parsing out my log file every time I try and update, because that takes time and is very resource-intensive. The .htaccess approach for Mint didn’t work, but I really didn’t put any time into figuring out why not, I just stuck the Javascript in the footer of my blog’s template (since it’s so easy to do in Wordpress), and voila! If I could get .htaccess to work, it’d be a perfect solution, logging everything just the way I want it to be logged.
I guess the bottom line is: Mint is great. I love it. Unfortunately, $30 a site is far too expensive for me. None of these sites are making me any money right now, and I just can’t justify dropping $30 for each one to use a stats package.
Now, if it were $30 for the first one and, say $3, for all the ones there-after (yearly recurring, of course), I might be able to swing it. I’m far more likely to drop $57 ($30 + (9 x $3)) to log all my sites than I am to drop $300 ($30 x 10). I’m also not going to put money into a stats package for just 2 or 3 of my sites. That kinda defeats the point, especially if it doesn’t actually offer me any new information in any new revolutionary ways. I still want stats for the others, so I’m still going to install AWStats, and might as well use it for everything.
Oh well, good luck to Mint. I can’t wait to see some future versions and more features!
So, yes to an extra MySQL query on *every page load*, but no to a batch process that can be scheduled at a non-peak time or even run on a separate machine? Crazy…
In my situation? Yeah. This blog is not exactly… uhh, how shall I say this as not to bruise my ego… “heavily trafficed”. An extra SQL query per page load is no biggie, particularly considering that WordPress is already doing about 30 a page load anyway (see the counter of Chinese teenagers in the footer).
I already have AWStats configured and running as a cron every morning (4am for those that are wondering). For me, I like to be able to easily peek in and see what’s going on at any point in the day. With AWStats, I’d have to load the stats page, then tell it to update the stats page, wait for it to parse out all of the log, and so forth… With Mint, the stats are there when I want them to be.
For higher traffic (corporate, popular people, etc.) sites, I’m sure we’d start considering the pro’s and con’s to running a seperate query to log each page view. For me it doesn’t matter in the slightest. It all comes down to your usage patterns.
For those that may be curious, I’ve put together another list of some of the pro’s and con’s to Mint that I’ve come upon after using it for a while now. I wanna give it a few more days of testing, but you should probably see more sometime later this week.
BTW: If you’re going to use a fake email, It’d be nice it if you’d untick the “Subscribe” box when you comment… I just got SPAMed by the Hotmail Postmaster because your email addy wasn’t valid…