on march 31st, i decided that this website needed a little pick-me-up. it was feeling a bit stale and, besides posting about knitting, i hadn't done any real maintenance to it in a while. i had been using webalizer stats on the site since i launched everything back in 2003. unfortunately, i didn't realize that all of my domains (all 4 of them) were rolling up into one log file and i was getting skewed results. i contacted my ISP and changed the settings so that i could see just what gleek.net was getting in the way of traffic but it just wasn't good enough. why? because of spam. yep, you not only get spam in your email inbox and on your blog, you can get it in your logs too. i have no idea how it works but referrer spam is a really pain in the keester. here's a big MIDDLE FINGER to all you spammers (again.. i'm sure this is about the milliionth time i've done it.) the only way to stop referrer spam is to install a website tracker that uses javascript to track users.

guess what i found?

all behold mint, a lovely little appllication SO worth the $30 and installation time. you have to have your own blog on your own server (sorry typepad and blogger users!) and your server has to be up to spec (most are) but that's pretty much the minimum of requirements for this little helper. i installed it on a friday evening after a long day at work, an exhausting session of knitting, and a glass of wine, so you can imagine just how easy it is to get this thing up and running. i set up a database for it (i DID NOT use my movabletype database.. i gave mint its very own) a week in advance, though, so you can't count that towards the hour that it took me to install mint and distribute it across all of gleek.net. i did the DB setup ahead of time because the mint peeps have this nifty little "compatibilty suite" that you can upload to your server to make sure that mint will run just fine. it's a safety measure to make sure that you can use mint before you ever buy it.

the total amount of "hard" installation comes with putting a link to the main mint javascript file on all of your blog templates and rebuilding the site. you also want to make sure that your TITLE tags on the pages are unique. in this case, i made sure that the blog entry title was also in the TITLE tag so that i could tell what pages were being accessed. i also installed the mint JS file on my static pages (patterns page, contact page, gallery, etc) so that i can see what's being viewed outside of the blog. easy peasy.

ok, now, you've all been waiting for it. you want to see what my stats look like, right? well, you're in luck. here is a one-time only viewing of what mint looks like for gleek.net. i'm a little nervous about putting this up here because i don't want you to think "she's bragging about how much traffic she's getting" (and it's really not that much.. piddly compared with such fine folks as yarn harlot or grumperina.) instead i want to spread the word about how these cool technologies can be used and implemented by even the most novice of html'ers. the results are worth it. here, you can see what i see when i jump into mint and check out my site.

minty clicky go biggy
really biggy

you see those panels called Outclicks, User Agent 007, Window Width, Local Searches, and DLoads? those are all plugins (also easy to install) that i downloaded either through the mint website or through Peppermint Tea. mint has a great plugin architecture called pepper that third-parties can write plugins for. i'm hoping that within the next six months there'll be even more, or maybe i'll try and write one myself. i'm not sure yet.

outclicks is probably the most useful pepper i've seen so far. it let's me know what links on my site people have clicked on and left gleek.net for. now i know that people love to click on the pattern links that i provide and my backpack sites. the dloads pepper is my second favorite. i've been using it to track how many times people download my patterns! you guys really love that circular bolero, huh?

the only cons i have about mint are:

• no graphical charts - though i think that i heard there would be a pepper plugin for this sort of thing.
• no stats by region - i love that webalizer let's me know where my readers are coming from (the UK, australia, japan...) this is accomplished by resolving the IP addresses back to the country of origin and i think that a pepper plugin for this would be worth paying for.
• pathing - it would be great if you could see a users path through the website, ie. what they clicked on and went to within my site. i'd like to see what the logical progression of navigation is amongst my users and then taylor the navigation to best suit their needs.

so all in all, i'm pretty happy with mint and will stick with it. anyone have any suggestions for other great blog tools?

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