Peppermint Tea

A Mint Updating Spree Awaits

Posted 8 May 2008 in by Sam Brown - Comment

Hold on tight, this is a big one! Mr Inman has released a monster update to the Peppermill that includes Mint and a bunch of his Pepper, so clear a space in your schedule and get updating.

Updates:

Some Notes:

The Mint update includes changes to the default Vanilla and Chocolate styles, so this update will require not only the new app folder to uploaded but the styles folder as well.

A new command was created in v2.16. /mint/?recover will repair Pepper data that was previously said to be beyond repair.

Also be sure to remove all of your old Pepper folders from your server (peppername_old) to avoid any further issues.

Roll on automatic updating ala Till’s Sergeant Pepper! I just spent the last 45 minutes updating 10 Mint installs and 33 Pepper. :/

Pepper Developers new and old, Notifications needs a new home

Posted 28 February 2008 in by Sam Brown - 1 Comment

Tony Gumbel creator of the Notifications Pepper is looking for a seasoned or aspiring Pepper Developer with the right knowledge to continue development of his Pepper!

I am the developer of the Notification pepper. I would like to see this pepper updated and receive new features, unfortunately I lack time and coding knowledge.

Over the past few months I have received numerous requests to add additional features, even requests willing to donate which I don’t accept. From the Mint Forum Thread

If anyone is interested in taking over development of the Pepper, you can find Tony’s contact details at his site gumbel.us

Mint Survey - Your IE Stats?

Posted 29 January 2008 in by Sam Brown - 30 Comments

I can only assume everyone has a copy of the fantastic User Agent 007 Pepper installed in their copy of Mint. How are those Internet Explorer percentages looking for you these days? I have several copies of Mint on several different genre of site and wonder how everyones stats compare. Out with them then.. log into Mint, open the Browser tab of UA007 and let us know!

At Peppermint Tea they look like so:

IE Stats

Overriding Page Titles in Mint

Posted 15 January 2008 in by Sam Brown - 3 Comments

This has been possible since the early days of Mint but is one of a handful of not so obviously documented features. See this post at Shaun's site from October '05.

If you are displaying your title tags as "Company Name - Section - Page Name" for instance, Mint may well be cutting off the page names because of the length of your title tag making it hard to distinguish between your different pages within Mint.

Using this simple bit of JavaScript before your Mint JavaScript include will solve the problem:

<script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript">
// <![CDATA[
var Mint_SI_DocumentTitle = 'NEWTITLE';
// ]]>
</script>

Do note, changes will not appear immediately as it will take time for previously recorded data to lapse, but all new data will be using the updated page name.

The Shaun Inman (M)interview

Posted 9 January 2008 in by Sam Brown - 7 Comments

Being one of Mint’s biggest fans there are constantly things I am bugging Shaun about for answers to, so instead of a constant barrage of emails I decided to set up a little Q&A session over the holiday period with our favorite developer regarding Mint, what is in Mint’s pipeline and what Shaun has planned for 2008! Enjoy.

Sam Brown: Tell us a little bit about your Mint installs, which Styles are you using, which Pepper do you have installed and how often do you check your Mint stats?

Shaun Inman: I’m using the new Leaves plugin that displays multiple Mint installations on a single page. I have it set to display 3 Mints at a time, haveamint.com, ShaunInman.com and Designologue.com. I also have few additional sites available from the Leaves drop-downs. All of my Mint installations use the default Vanilla Mint style and the default settings—Mint is the result of my dissatisfaction with other stats packages, it follows that the defaults are my preferred settings.

On the surface, Designologue.com is running “Thin Mint” (just Mint with the Default and Backup/Restore Pepper) plus the iPhone Pepper. But since this installation serves as a Mint demo I also have an additional custom paneless Pepper called Cleaner installed that automatically removes any unsavory search terms (it’s amazing how much search traffic a single word taken out of context can drive to your site).

The rest of my installs are considerably heftier, often running all of the publicly available first-party Pepper plus a couple of custom Pepper. On ShaunInman.com I have the iPhone Pepper, Local Searches, User Agent 007, Secret Crush, Bird Feeder, Real Estate, Outbound and Visits Diff. I also use a custom download counting Pepper called Dropped that displays data collected by the custom framework used on ShaunInman.com and haveamint.com (it’s nowhere near as full-featured as Till or Steve’s offerings). I also keep the Doorbell and Growl Pepper on the server and available under the Install tab for when I really want to be distracted.

Mint on haveamint.com is set up just like ShaunInman.com plus one additional custom Pepper called Cashew. This Pepper was originally a hack of Kyle Rove’s Fresh View Pepper but instead of graphing visits Cashew graphs the number of licenses/upgrades. It has since been ported to the graphing system used by other Mint 2 Pepper but the name stuck.

I only check my Mint Leaves once a day (part of my New Year’s Resolutions) unless I’m checking in to see how sales are doing. Of course, as soon as I post something that resolution is likely to go out the window. (Already broken!)

The sale of your 10,000th Mint license must not be far away, do you plan on celebrating this milestone?

Mint sold its ten-thousandth license a while ago actually. In my Year Two in Review I mentioned more than eight-thousand customers—many of which have more than one Mint license. The week or so before the ten-thousandth sale my wife Leslie and I talked about making a Mint logo-shaped cake and even bought the cake mix, frosting, and food coloring. But life happened. We came across the dry ingredients while packing for our move. They were all past their expiration date. So no cake. I probably ended up having a Mint Julep or something.

Is piracy still rife and how much of your time is spent dealing with it?

I still come across the occasional pirated Mint install but the always-effective form letter to the host has long been written so its not the time sink it once was. The new Account Center-integrated Forum on haveamint.com also spares me from mistakenly supporting unlicensed Mint installations.

Have you had any big offers to purchase Mint and how close have you come to moving onto greener pastures?

I’ve been approached a few times but always made it clear that I wasn’t interested before a formal offer could be made. As for greener pastures, most of those would involve relocation, a commute and working towards someone else’s vision—none of which interest me at this point in time.

With a very successful launch of Mint 2, I assume you are not thinking much about Version 3, but are there any significant things that you plan on adding to your Road Map at this early stage?

Not at this point. One of Mint’s greatest strengths is its extensibility. Because of the Pepper API new features don’t have to equal new version. The majority of things I would like to do wouldn’t directly affect or benefit the average user of Mint (eg. revamping the Pepper API) so they become hard to justify. Of course, there will always be those user-beneficial features that do require a significant rewrite (eg. adding support for multiple-users/logins) but I haven’t set any priorities for Mint 3 yet.

Being the stats aficionado that you are, how do you see stat tracking changing in the coming years, if at all? Is JavaScript tracking the new way forward or will we always be checking our other server side stats packages?

JavaScript tracking isn’t really anything new but properly implemented it’s much more computationally expensive to game than traditional log-based or server-side analysis. When designing Mint I decided up front that maintaining a blacklist of known referrer-spammers, spiders and crawlers was not something I wanted the user or myself to have to do. A whitelist didn’t make sense for this application but given the nature of my own site’s audiences and by extension those who would find Mint appealing, JavaScript was the obvious solution.

You are one of the very few designer developers out there that is able to marry your brilliant code with a gorgeous design, this was touched upon by Jon Hicks in his latest episode of The Rissington Podcast (he called you a bastard! (Sorry Jon!)). How have you come to accomplish this feat that is rarely seen elsewhere?

Oh this one’s easy. I just don’t know when to stop. I will bang my head against the proverbial wall until I understand something—to the detriment of everything else. Sleep. Relationships. It’s really not the enviable quality everyone makes it out to be. It’s not a quick process either.

Of course, I am a classically trained graphic designer. As for code and development, I had a couple computer science friends who pointed me in the right direction early on. A collection of dense, occasionally impenetrable O’Reilly books and googling got me the rest of the way.

Where is our Mint swag? Don’t get me wrong, I love my Mint wallpapers but I feel this is an untapped market for you! Is swag in the pipeline?

Swag is in the pipeline. It’s just stuck in the pipeline. I’m not looking to just slap the Mint logo on warm bodies as walking billboards. A Mint tee should stand on its own even if you’re not a Mint junkie. Then it’s that much cooler if you are. I’ll be posting some ideas on my site after the New Year.

What is next for Shaun Inman? With Mint doing so well and you not taking on any new freelance projects (that I am aware of), what do you see yourself doing this time next year? A Mint Year 3 in Review blog post?

Well, there’s the inevitable annual restless refresh of ShaunInman.com. The new version has been designed and some preliminary production is already underway. I really love the current version—especially during the bluer winter months—so I plan on keeping it up until at least February. Will the redesign prompt a return to regular blogging? Probably not, but it certainly won’t hurt any.

I’d love to make sometime to write and record a new ep, maybe even a collaboration—you can do some amazing stuff with Garage Band these days. I’ve been composing some instrumentals lately but I’d love to combine that with the more usual verse-chorus-verse material I’ve always done.

Then there’s the scores of unfinished personal projects left in various stages of completion. A custom pixel portrait business card service, a self-hosted RSS reader, a new Designologue.com, a Japanese-style RPG (think 16-bit generation Final Fantasies—this one seems especially daunting). It will be interesting to see what shakes out of aught-eight.

Sam Brown: A huge thanks to Shaun Inman for taking time out over the holiday period to answer some Mint related questions.