Powered by Mint (tm)
A [“good friend of mine”:http://joen.dk/] tells me to check out this site called “have a mint”:http://www.haveamint.com/ and it turns out to be some kind of smart statistics web application you can implement on your site. So I decide to give it a try.
The site had a demo-feature which supposedly featured a demo of the system, but since it was nowhere to be found, I fetched some video the author had created promoting the features. It looked pretty nice, and the system uses javascript-includes to actually write the statistics, so I figured I’d throw $30 after this guy, and have something to do during the evening. First of, the system wouldn’t accept my purchase made by Opera 8, which was a big turn off. I fetched the new FF Deer Park beta[1] and purchased the Mint-system through that instead. Worked out fine in there. Hm. I get the file, put it on my domain, and fire up the install wizard-thingie. First of, I had purchased a license for this site (printf.dk), but as I write it in the wizard, it simply won’t accept it. Being too lazy to email and wait for a fix, and being a hacker by choice, I scour through the code and modify the “_verifyRegistration” function (or something like that). I install the system, and log in. Looks fine so far, so I integrate it with my blog here, and do some hits. I get in the system, and hit “Preferences”. To my disappointment, it gives me the log in screen. Hm. I figure out (again, by wandering through the code) that it doesn’t set the auth-cookie correctly. Why? Because my site is proxyed from apache1 to apache2 transparently, and since the system would run on apache2, my browser will not accept a cookie for that port. I hack of a quick fix[2], and I’m in. Install some “peppers” (the author eleganty chose to name his extensions “peppers”, so that would be “pepper mints”. clever..), and basically have the system up and running as I’d like it to be. So far I’ve only been using it for the day, and I haven’t been using any kind of live statistics like this before, but I must say, I’m very impressed. There’s nothing revolutionary about it as such, but it’s a nice concept. As they say, it’s easy to do stuff, the hard part is thinking of it. I’m sure this will satisfy my not-so-important needs of having statistics of my visitors, but it’s a nice thing to have, and I don’t regret the $30. Also, me being a programmer, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it has an extensible framework with an, albeit not documented, easy API to interact with. Good job Shaun, you’ve done well! :-) fn1. “http://www.firefox.com”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ fn2. “http://files.printf.dk/patches/mint-proxy.patch”:http://files.printf.dk/patches/mint-proxy.patch
Looks pretty neat, a heck of a lot nicer than Analog, which my host is currently using… Must.. get..