Mmmm Minty!
The NewsHawker public beta has generated enough referral links that by the end of January I could no longer easily determine which referrals were new with Awstats. I like to keep track of and visit new referrals since the referring site often has feedback on the application or has questions which I may be able to answer. Mint 2 was recently released and I was very pleased to discover it solved this problem extremely well and was a joy to use. Mint was easy to install but, nonetheless, I’ll share what I did to integrate it with my WordPress 2.0-based site.
However, I’ll first explain why I like Mint. Analog is the default stats package provided by Dreamhost and is fine for casual use (I use it to keep track of my family’s site). However, because of my previous experience with Awstats, I quickly installed it to present statistics for this site. Awstats has a number of strengths. It can present a ton of information and is extremely configurable. Regardless, as I mentioned above, I couldn’t easily determine which were the new and unique referrals. Mint solved this problem elegantly:
What is so elegant about Mint’s solution? The “Feed” button in the lower-right corner. Being notified in NetNewsWire of my newest unique referrals is fantastic and saves time.
Despite the fact the Mint presents much less data than Awstats, I have found that Mint presents almost everything I actually want. In fact, the only stat I miss is the number of times NewsHawker has been downloaded. Once the Download Counter Pepper is updated for Mint 2, this won’t be an issue. (A Pepper is a plug-in for Mint.) Mint is a great example of a product that is attractive because it does less and does it well.
The instructions for Mint were clear and concise. To integrate it with WordPress, I first modified by theme’s header to invoke mint:
<script src="/mint/?js" type="text/javascript"></script>
The changes required for the Bird Feeder Pepper were a bit more involved. I edited the wp-atom.php, wp-rdf.php, wp-rss.php, and wp-rss2.php files. In each case, I added a php block similar to the following immediately after the first php block:
<?php
define('BIRDFEED', 'Articles (Atom)');
include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/feeder/index.php');
?>
For most of the feed templates, I simply replaced the item’s link tag with:
<link><?php $BirdFeeder->seed(get_the_title_rss(),
get_permalink()); ?></link>
The Atom template was slightly different. The item’s link tag became:
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="<?php
$BirdFeeder->seed(get_the_title_rss(),
get_permalink()); ?>" />
(A word of warning: Reportedly, there may be an incompatibility between some Wordpress 2.1 installations and the Bird Feeder Pepper.)
I then changed my theme such that the title of each page displays the most specific name first. That is, “Road to Beta « Blog Archive « Sugar Maple Software”, rather than “Sugar Maple Software » Blog Archive » Road to Beta.” This makes it much easier to distinguish page titles in Mint (and probably in the browser’s tabs as well).
I have an idea for a Pepper which someone is welcome to implement since I expect I won’t get around to it for a while. It would be useful if there was a pepper which displayed data gathered by SparklePlus. If anyone is aware of such a thing, please let me know.
Update 16feb2007: I just upgraded to WordPress 2.1. Mint continues to work fine. Bird Feeder is also working fine for me. In addition, rather than modifying the WordPress code myself, I’m using the Mint Bird Feeder WordPress plugin.
