by WebKeyDesign | Oct 13, 2006 | Software
Webmasters undeniably rely on web site statistics to give them a clue as to how their respective sites are doing. Statistics become important in evaluating site changes and even adding new content. For the do-it-yourself webmaster, clear and easy to use stat packages become a necessity, so obviously you want to pick the right web stats program for your site. Your choices range from web services like Google Analytics, to programs that analyse your webserver logs, such as AWStats, or you can choose a script that concentrates on what your web site activity is at the moment. Mint concentrates on just the essential statistics you need, in this way it is a good stats program for webmasters who are not interested in long term analysis. Bloggers in particular will find Mint to be a good alternative to AWStats or Google Analytics, since it can be integrated with most major web blogging scripts like WordPress. If however you are in the need of more in depth reports or eCommerce tracking, then Mint is not for you.
Unwrapped Mint
There are two ways to setup Mint. You can simply add a single line of javascript code to the head tag of your html, or in the case of WordPress, to the header.php template file. The advanced method requires that you have PHP installed as an Apache module and is harder to implement if you are not an experienced webmaster. Since Mint requires javascript, it is unable to track any visits if javascript is disabled. This is usually not a problem for most people, since javascript is now a pretty common requirement. At the time of this writing, Mint also requires Apache, PHP, and MySQL in order to run properly. Most Linux and UNIX based web servers will satisfy these requirements, but Windows servers will not work. Even with all these stipulations, I still found Mint to be an interesting and worthwhile investment.
For $30 per domain, Mint can provide real time stats and unlike other stat packages, it totally ignores bots and spammer scripts. This gives you a more accurate picture of actual hits on your site. Compared to other stats packages, I would say Mint is actually more conservative about hits. On the other side, the standard Mint stats are not very spectacular, fortunately, Mint is expandable. Its plugin architecture allows for new search panes to be added to the standard Mint stats view. These plugins are referred to as peppers. I highly recommend XXX Strong Mint, Sparks!, and Fresh View. You can find more peppers on the Peppermint Tea page.
WordPress & Mint
If you run WordPress and use ShortStat, you might be wondering if Mint is worth the price of admission. The advantage of Mint is that you can track static html pages as well as your WordPress blog. Other than that, the other big difference is that ShortStat registers way too many hits from search engines and bots as regular hits. Mint is more accurate or you might say conservative in its hit tracking. In my opinion, if you receive moderate traffic above fifty actual hits from actual visitors you probably could benefit from Mint. Technically, thirty dollars is not a lot of money these days, so Mint is a pretty good value considering how much commercial web site tracking software costs.
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by WebKeyDesign | Oct 11, 2006 | News & Trends
This is perhaps the most interesting news I’ve heard all week. According to MacWorld, Qualcomm is opensourcing Eudora. I’ve only been using Eudora since version 3.0, and it has always been my preferred email client on all my Macintosh systems. When OS X came out, I never embraced Apple’s Mail, simply because Eudora had so much of my old email, and by now I can’t seem to match the comfort level with any other mail client. About the only email interface that I feel comfortable with is webmail via Horde and Gmail. Although I use Mozilla Thunderbird daily, it still feels slow and alien to me, every time I use it. In reality, Eudora’s interface is so 90’s. The interface feels out of place in OS X and a little hard to use compared to modern GUI apps. Still I can’t seem to feel very fond of Thunderbird’s huge icons and web browser like interface. On the otherside of the pond, there’s Outlook and I cringe daily at how complicated Outlook really is. It would be great if someone could make an email client that can do everything Outlook can do, but do it in a clean and friendly interface, kind of like what Apple did for the MP3 player with iTunes.
For OS X users, it looks like Eudora 6.2.4 will be the last commercial version. Qualcomm expects the first Mozilla Eudora opensource version to come out in 2007, but who knows how well documented the code is after all these years. Most of all, I wonder what the interface will look like in the future? Eudora needs a good GUI makeover.
Eudora Revisited
- Qualcomm’s Penelope Project intends to build an extension to Mozilla Thunderbird that will make Thunderbird look similar to Eudora.
- Correo is an open-source project that aims to use Mozilla code to develop a native mail application for Mac OS X users, doing for email what Camino did for the Web browser.
- Infinity Data Systems – MailForge is a commercial project that intends to build a new email client that looks and feels similar to Eudora.
by WebKeyDesign | Oct 2, 2006 | WebKeyDesign
WebKeyDesign now accepts Google Checkout as payment. If you have not heard of Google Checkout yet, it is somewhat similar to PayPal. It allows you to make purchases through a credit card without giving your credit card number to the merchant. In this case, WebKeyDesign. Google will collect payment and then deposit the amount (minus their fee or course) into the merchant’s bank account. This way customers can trust their credit card information to only Google and have less risk when purchasing items from the Internet. You must setup a Google Checkout account in order to use it.
You can still purchase web hosting with PayPal if you prefer. Google Checkout is just another option now when you order web hosting.
by WebKeyDesign | Sep 27, 2006 | Mac OS X
As usual, last Sunday night, my Powerbook decided to come down with a really strange problem. It slowed to a crawl and for a moment I thought my hard drive was dying a slow death. However Disk Utility, showed no problems at all, so I was a bit puzzled by the problem. Eventually after deleting cache files with Cache Out X and rebuilding Prebindings and Spotlight databases, everything was back to normal. Apparantly it does not matter if I run Windows or OS X, I still end up doing computer maintenance at late hours of the night, when I could be sleeping.
I found these terminal commands handy. Unlike third party utilities, you can run these on any up-to-date OS X system.
To update Prebindings manually:
sudo update_prebinding -root / -force
To delete the Spotlight database from the boot volume:
sudo mdutil -E /
To run Software Update from terminal:
softwareupdate -l
To install Software Updates found:
sudo softwareupdate -i -a
Notes: Prebindings usually do not have to be redone, as OS X does this automatically, but if you are having a strange problem; rebuilding might help. Deleting the Spotlight database forces OS X to rebuild it right away, so it is best to let the computer sit overnight while it indexes the vloume. Spotlight is a feature of Mac OS X 10.4. For Software Update, terminal will not prompt for restart, so you must remember to do this after the updates are installed.
To Disable DMG File Verification:
defaults write com.apple.frameworks.diskimages skip-verify true
by WebKeyDesign | Sep 18, 2006 | Networking
This week I have been looking at how to detect TCP/IP ports on a local area network to see if an application was setup correctly. And while using ping and tracert from a DOS prompt works well for somethings, I was looking at what else I could use. For Mac OS X users, the Network Utility tool features ping and traceroute options, or you can always use a terminal window directly to ping and traceroute. To verify that you have a listening port, the command line utility netstat -a comes in handy on both Windows and Mac OS X. With this you can verify that a particular port number is listening. You can still use the website CanYouSeeMe.org, if you want to verify that your particular computer is open to the Internet, but this only works if your router is setup to forward requests for this port. In the case where you want to run a VNC or some other service for only local network connections, netstat works much better to verify that the port is in fact listening.
Another tool which Windows users might find handy is Microsoft’s PortQryUI tool. This utility reports the port status of TCP and UDP ports on a computer that you select.
