kuniform

As I noted earlier, I’ve been using Mint (so tasty and refreshing) along with Dreamhost’s built in stats counter software, I’ve had a bit of Google envy. Upon telling some web developer friends I’m using Mint, they would say things like, “You dummy! Why would you pay $30 for that? Google has it for free.” Thus far my answers have been to say things like, “But Shaun Inman is a person. It’s only $30. Google has $100 billion.” Then I go off on a diatribe about how, though I respect the heck outta Jeffrey Veen, Mint seems better, interfaces, marketing, building to flip sucks, blah blah blah.
Apparently, I need to get out more, and find more interesting friends. Today, though, my right brain was singing its intuitive praises as I read this objective and detailed comparison of Mint and Google Analytics by David Shea. Seems like he’s also redesigning his website. Heck, even his old design kicks the living crap out of mine. Will you be my friend, David? Awwwwwww.

I finally broke down and installed Shaun Inman’s Mint logging software. For the $30 fee, it is already money well spent. I use Dreamhost as my host and WordPress as my blog software. Setting up my system for using Mint was a snap.

On the Mint support blogs it’s suggested to simply use your WordPress database settings to get Mint running. This made me a bit nervous, so I setup a separate subdomain and database for Mint. All in all, with installing some standard Mint plugins and a neat WordPress plugin for Mint installation took me 45 minutes. Having done it once, doing it again on another site would probably take me 10 minutes.

Dreamhost provides stats software, so what does Mint get me? It ignores robots from search engines, my own visits (once cookied), and provides a readable, usable interface. So far, it’s well worth it. Maybe once I see the traffic unadulterated by extra hits from me and the ‘bots, my ego won’t agree with it!