Minted
Spurred on by Shaun Inman’s talk at the Future of Web Apps Summit last week, I’ve finally got round to installing Mint on this site.
Installation was a breeze. From dusting off my credit card, to getting it installed and up and running took about 10 mins. I immediately headed off to Peppermint Tea to grab lots of Peppers — 3rd party plug-ins which enhance Mint’s feature-set. I got a bit carried away and installed just about everything, but I’ve gradually pared it down to a few of the more useful ones :
- Session Tracker : used with XXX Strong Mint, this is the ultimate stalking tool. Watch the trails left by people browsing your site.
- Download Counter : I can now see how many desktops or photos are being grabbed from the site (note to developers : perhaps be nice to see by whom and when?).
- Outclicks : see where people go to after leaving your site. Kinda like Referrers, inverted.
Mint has also revealed lots of info I didn’t know before about my site. For example, the visits pane shows that this site pulls in about 300 unique visits a day. A lot of this traffic comes from Google searches, but it definitely took me by surprise (I now feel a bit more obliged to write more interesting stuff!). There’s also interesting data about user agents and window sizes. For example I now know that 1% of visitors have a window width greater than 1824 pixels (which, on this site, puts the line length at about 50 words!), and around 1% browse using Epiphany and Netscape Communicator (god knows how the site looks to them!).
The UI is very impressive, and it’s obvious Shaun has placed a lot of care and thought into building the app, however I still think $30 is a bit steep. For a similar fee you can buy a license for a quality desktop app like Transmit or Textmate. I personally don’t mind paying extra for quality design and workmanship (not to mention supporting the independent developer), but I reckon around $15-20 would have been a better price point.
Posted 2 years, 7 months ago on 14th February 2006.
- Combatting Form Spam
- Match of the Dire
- Popular Posts
- Minted
- Future of Web Apps Summit : A Review
- Molly in the Toon
- Chop Souey
- 10 years of Apple.com
Comments
I agree its a little bit expensive, especially as its a license for site - installing it on each clients site becomes very costly!
Nice redisgn btw! :)
You guys complaining about price crack me up. Do you go out to dinner? How much does dinner for 2 cost? How useful is Mint? I thought so...
Anonymous · 2 years, 7 months ago
Just my opinion, but I reckon a lower price point would pay for itself by attracting more sales and maybe even dissuading piracy.
Also, I’m all for free speech, but next time you feel like leaving some criticism, have the balls to use your real name.
Probably not, Graham. I’ve said my piece on the price so there’s no reason for me to leave anonymous snide remarks.
Shaun Inman · www · 2 years, 7 months ago
Personally I use Google Analytics, it is free and pretty damn powerful. Anyway, I must say that Mint looks very nice, but 30$ is a bit too much - especially when Analytics is free.
I’ll have to agree with Amix on this one.
Mint may look nice (i don’t like it though), but paying $30 per site for information you can get for free from your host (most hosts have AWStats) or from Google Analytics (which has a lot more information about your visitors than Mint) is out of the question for me.
josue salazar · www · 2 years, 7 months ago
Re the popularity of the blog, I think it just comes down to your unpretencious writing style, and the fact you don’t go down the (more easy/popular) self publicist path.
When reading your blog, it doesn’t sound like you’re selling me something. I’m a long time reader, and will continue to read. Keep up the good work ;)
Andrew · www · 2 years, 7 months ago