Minty fresh

An entry published by James Bennett on April 19, 2008, Part of the categories Meta and Misc. 11 comments posted.

For a while now I’ve been really disappointed with the state of web stats.

When I moved over to my shiny new server back in September of last year, I ditched Mint because it requires PHP and MySQL, neither of which will ever, under any circumstances, be allowed on my box. So I started fishing around for something else; most other host-it-yourself stats packages were, frankly, crap either in terms of what they tracked or the interface they presented it in, which led me to look for a hosted solution.

I tried Google Analytics for a while, because it’s free and has some impressive visualization tricks. But it’s got three problems that really turned me off after I’d used it a bit:

  1. The data only updates once a day or thereabouts. Since a lot of what I want out of a stats package is “who’s linking to me right now”, that’s no good; I like being able to see when something I’ve written is suddenly popular, and I don’t want to wait a couple days for the number-crunching to tell me about it.
  2. It’s really oriented toward sales and marketing people. I have no doubt that it’s an incredibly useful tool for those folks, but I’m not those folks. I’m just a guy writing a blog, and I don’t need campaigns and conversion goals and all that crap cluttering up my stats views.
  3. The interface is basically useless without Flash. I surf with Flash disabled by default, and only turn it on temporarily when there’s something I really want to see. Google Analytics turned out not to be one of those things.

Plus, there are a lot of paranoid people out there who block the Analytics JavaScript and cookie, so if you’ve got a tech-oriented audience you don’t even get accurate stats.

So then I tried reinvigorate (which I’ve also used on a few other sites). It gave me real-time data, wasn’t marketing-oriented and didn’t require Flash, so it seemed like a win. But in time I got annoyed with it as well. The biggest problem I had with reinvigorate was that all of its data is fleeting: aside from pageviews/visitors over time, it really doesn’t keep anything around, instead showing you things like “top recent referers” and “recent browser usage breakdown”. Sometimes that tends to skew the results a bit; for example, when I write something that John Gruber likes and he links it, I end up with some weird stats.

I’ve shopped around a bit looking at other solutions, and all of them looked like they’d have one problem or another. So this morning, during a break from writing, I took a little bit of time out and went over to my shared-hosting account with Joyent, set up a subdomain and a MySQL database on it, and installed Mint. It’s live and tracking, so if you’re one of those paranoid folks who watches everything your web browser does, you’ll get prompted to take a cookie from stats.b-list.org.

And finally I’m happy. Mint, I’m sorry I ever left you. You’re the best stats package that’s ever happened to me, and I’m never gonna give you up again.

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On April 19, 2008, Rob Hudson said:

I’ve been meaning to play around with eucaliptus — a sort of Mint clone in Django. I know it’s not done yet but it looks like there’s enough there to play around with. I don’t recall whose project that is. I asked about wanting to build a web stats package on #django one day and this person pointed out his repo here:

http://five.cylon.no/browser/eucaliptus/trunk/eucaliptus/docs/overview.txt

On April 19, 2008, Nicolas said:

Lately I’ve been considering the idea of writing a pluggable django app to do mint-like stats.. I always get discuraged for having to include eithe a js library (better) or flash (worse). if I end up writting it ill probably go with a “no default js included but download this if you like” kindda thing.. I’ll let you know if I get it done.. (in exchange for the good blog posts! :p )

On April 19, 2008, Brett said:

What do you use to enable / disable Flash? I’d do the same if it were simple.

I might steal this setup (Joyent shared and all), as I’ve been pretty “meh” about Google Analytics also… never tried Mint. Thanks!

On April 19, 2008, Wilson said:

I was happy with how easy WebFaction made it to wire up a PHP setup just for Mint without any subdomaining or other fancypants maneuvering. A lot easier than keeping my Dreamhost around for the sole purpose of running whatever static/PHP leftovers I want to keep.

On April 19, 2008, Marty Alchin said:

I too have been getting sick of Google Analytics. The server I’m on has PHP and MySQL on it already though, so maybe I’ll give Mint a chance. Of course, I may also still be too much of a cheapskate.

On April 19, 2008, David, biologeek said:

Did you try bbclone? It has an interesting detailled view

Thanks for the link Rob, that’s exactly what I looked for in order to be full Django.

On April 21, 2008, Mayuresh said:

Any specific reason(s) why you would not put MySQL on your box?

I have hosted a couple of sites with MySQL as the backend. Would like to know if I will be facing problems with the configuration later.

On April 21, 2008, Shaun Inman said:

Happy to have you back James ;)

On April 23, 2008, Shabda Raaj said:

Have you tried Clicky. This is optimized more towards the type of stats you are looking for.

On April 28, 2008, nixusr said:

I’m also curious > Any specific reason(s) why you would not put PHP/MySQL on your box?

On May 7, 2008, rajbot said:

yes, please elaborate your reasoning behind not putting PHP/MySQL on your box so that the rest of us may be enlightened.

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