Mintal…

September 7, 2005 | Filed Under Media 

Shaun Inman is a well respected web designer who is often named as one of the most influential people in the medium, he recently launched a webstats package called Mint which gives highly detailed refferer information about a sites visitors.

It’s also very pretty, a wonderful peice of CSS/XHTML design.

But get this, mint relies on javascript in order to function. Inmans rational is that it needs .js in order to combat auto-index bots, spiders and other types of refferer ’spam’, he states If you must have detailed usage information on the miniscule percentage of your users browsing with JavaScript disabled then Mint may not be the right solution for you.

Excuse me?

Miniscule?

Recent logs from my clients websites give an average of 11% of users are browsing sans-javascript, this is a substantial amount of people. I can also point to a public source of data giving 10% as the amount.

I’d like to guess that 10% without .js is a greater amount of refferals than the amount of refferer spam most sites get.

So it certainly is NOT the right package for me, and probably - unless modified to allow it to work without .js - never will be. Sorry Shaun.

hat-tip: baz

Tags: Media

Comments

2 Responses to “Mintal…”

  1. Q Daily News on September 7th, 2005 10:20 pm

    An assess-Mint

    Over the past two days, it’s been hard not to notice the excitement around the world of weblogs about Mint, Shaun Inman’s new web stats app. I’ll admit that after reading some of the posts by Mint’s beta testers, I…

  2. Justin Knoll on December 19th, 2005 6:53 pm

    Good points, but what percentage of the 10% figure can be attributed to bots? The good guys might provide truthful user agent strings that we could use to subtract from the total, but referrer spammers, email harvesters, etc. are spoofing.

    The 10% figure for actual breathing users with Javascript disabled just doesn’t compute. I’m hard pressed to physically locate a box with JavaScript disabled.

    Maybe a better metric would be the percentage of non-bot-identifying search engine referrrals that have JavaScript disabled?

    Granted, you probably would like to be able to see when GoogleBot et. al are visiting your site, and it’s a shame Mint can’t help wth this, though there are simple ways to do that outside of Mint.

    I’ve found Mint a great fit for the Gap left by Google’s acquisition, freeing, and “wait to sign up”-ing of Urchin. The free logfile-parsing stats tools (awstats, webalizer…) are good as supplements to Urchin, but they can’t match Mint’s interface in front of a client.

    If Google can figure out how to scale Google Analytics nee Urchin to the level they need to in order to give it away for free, then we’ll see new Mint subscriptions wither away. Of course, even then Google Analytics will have the same JavaScript disabled concerns.

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