Brandon Kelly

Oct  6, 2007

Just installed Mint

I just installed Mint, a ridiculously cool website analytics tool. Setup was surprisingly quick and painless, with two somewhat frustrating exceptions:

  1. After creating my account, it took me five minutes to locate the little download link in the top-right corner of their site. It’s labeled “Mint 2.12”, instead of the tried and true “download”, and as far as I can tell, it’s not linked-to from anywhere within the main content area on any of the pages. I suggested they add a link to the Welcome emails, as well as the FAQ, Is Mint a hosted service?.
  2. One of the “peppers” (plugins), Bird Feeder, lets you keep track of all things RSS. One of the steps in setting that up requires adding a couple PHP scripts to the RSS/Atom templates in Movable Type. When I tried submitting the modified template modules, I got a “Precondition Failed” error, which turned out to be a result of mod_security not liking the idea of submitting PHP scripts through textareas. The fix was simple (temporarily add SecFilterEngine Off to /cgi-bin/.htaccess), but it would have been nice if there were a little note in Bird Feeder's Readme file alerting me about the potential issue beforehand.