Mint Site Statistics Review
For a while now (well, several years) I’ve been using the venerable analog and Report Magic to generate the statistics for my hosted sites. Unfortunately, they have become a little dated in appearance and currency. Nightly reports were fine five years ago, but we live in faster times now!
Enter Mint. A relatively new entrant to the statistics gathering scene, released by the ever present Shaun Inman. Ok, it’s not that new, I’ve been wanting to try it for a while. Version two seemed a good enough excuse. Rather than trawl through your logs after the fact, Mint takes the approach of logging statistics about your site as live as people browse it. That’s pretty common nowadays I guess, pioneered by Google Analytics, with clones like Piwik (an open source competitor) using the same mechanism.
The Good
- The UI is excellent! Orders of magnitude better than the Report Magic reports
- Installation was a breeze, and pretty much driven through the web interface. I had only had to make changes to a single php file before uploading
- Even better, there’s a compatibility suite that will figure out whether your hosting environment is suitable for Mint
- Mint is extremely extensible, something I’m a big fan of, and there is already a thriving community of extensions
- I love the Junior Mint dashboard Widget, which saves me hitting Refresh all the time
The Bad
- The collection mechanism depends on you inserting a custom script link into the HEAD of your pages. This is fine for well structure PHP apps like Wordpress of zenphoto, but more tricky if you have a bunch of static pages
- I find myself wanting to drag and re-order the Pepper containers around all the time, a la “pick your favorite portal”. The mouse icon even turns into a hand, making me think something will happen. Piwik does support this.
- I’d like to be able to “roll up” (think minimize) some of the Pepper containers
- I have session problems from time and time and find myself having to log in again.
Overall, my impression with Mint has been excellent. The UI is great, installation was a breeze, and it’s easily customizable and extensible. What more could you ask for? I do love my Minty fresh stats. And you can’t argue about the beauty of the logo design!
Filed under Technology, Webapps | Comment (0)Daniel Burka’s FOWD London presentation
I was recently at the FOWD London event, put on by the ever busy Carsonified team. There were a slew of good presentations, of which I haven’t really said much (yet), but one of the standouts was from Daniel Burka of Digg, Pownce and Mozilla fame.
What I liked about the presentation was that although Daniel was actually talking about design, the core principles are exactly the same as those I’ve been pushing in my software teams for a while. They also are extremely reminiscent of the key tenets of Agile development.
Less is More
One of my favorite tenets for software development. My preferred way of stating this is:
A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
This is always the first principle I try to establish with any of my software teams. In Daniel’s parlance, it comes out as “Iteration is subtraction too. Try to remove as much as you add”. For those of us practicing Agile, that might sound like “Refactor, refactor, refactor”!
Build extensible frameworks
The mantra:
Leverage, extensibility and re-use. Todd Papaioannou (yeah, I’m claiming it!)
will be extremely familiar to those who have worked on my projects. By this I mean that a key goal for all software that I build is to continually review whether it is stove piped, or whether it is either a) leveraging other software already out there, or b) someone else can leverage or extend it. Think plugin architectures. Nothing drives me more crazy than people with the NIH attitude wanting to reinvent the wheel. Do you know how many XML parsers/serializers I’ve seen??
In Daniel’s presentation he talks about the difference in Architecture, the High and Low road. His preference is the Low road, which gives you lots of reusable idioms to construct your final product. This is the same message I push in software development. Which leads nicely onto …
Continually Iterate
Again, one of the core tenets of Agile development, this is summed up in the KISS approach. Do the simplest thing first that works, get it out there, and then see if it works. If it doesn’t iterate quickly. Lots of software developers get mired in the mud of trying to build super edifices, when all they need to do is to do something much more simple.
In fact, Iterative design as a means of designing adaptable websites was the general theme of Daniel’s presentation, and I think it’s spot on. You never know exactly how the humans that use your interface, game or software product are going to react, and what they are going to do. That’s a lesson I learnt with running Terafirma. But you have to be prepared to iterate quickly if there is a problem, or a concerted need for improvement.
Here’s the video of the presentation:
From Future of Web Design on Vimeo.
You may also want to follow along with the slides:
[Updated - May 25]
Looks like Daniel has updated his slides for Mesh Conference. They now include a case study of the Digg Comments system.
Technorati Tags: fowd, webdesign, agile, daniel burka
The Global 5 million
A couple of weeks ago I watched DDH’s presentation at Startup School. It was actually a lot better than I was expecting. The guy has charisma, clearly. There was a lot of really good stuff in it, but the thing that really resonated with me was his characterization of what should be the target audience for a web startup: the Global 5 million. Instead of trying to do a Youtube, why not build a profitable, successful business and enjoy life? Right on! I think it hit the nail square on the head with the problem I have with a whole host of startups out there, even the ones I have worked for. Youtube is a freak occurrence, albeit a great one for the guys who started it. But if you set out with that goal in mind, take a bunch of VC cash and succumb to the pressure to generate 10’s of million in revenue, you’re in for a hiding. It’s something that Ryan has been talking about too.
If you haven’t seen the presentation, check it out:
Watch live video from HackerTV on Justin.tv
Technorati Tags: dhh, startupschool
Building performant web applications
Since we’re all building increasingly complex web applications it’s important to focus on the performance of those apps as that is a key determination of the user experience. Unfortunately, it’s also a bit of a black art. There are a slew of different factors in web app performance, which also vary greatly from browser to browser.
One of the best resources out there is a guy called Steve Souders, who used to work for Yahoo and now works for Google. His first presentation about site performance is full of little gems that every self respecting web developer should at least think about.
He’s now released a new presentation which takes some of these ideas even further. One of the key lessons in this presentation is focusing on loading the “front end” of the wep app first. That is, the part the user must see and interact with immediately, and delaying loading those parts that are not needed until later.
Not content with slideware, he also has created a couple of tools to help:
- Yslow: a Firefox plugin that measures the stages of loading a web page
- Cuzillion: a new tool for investigating the performance impact of different DOM elements
Check out the blog post about Cuzillion here.
Understanding the implications of how and in what order you load your resources is key to performance. Especially in the Portlets world where you are going to be on a page with a bunch of other portlets. I would highly recommend taking a glance through his presentations for ideas on optimizing your webapps.
Technorati Tags: webapps, performance
Scrybe Beta has begun
Scrybe have started sending out their beta invites and I can’t wait to try the app out. I guess I’m gonna have to wait though, since it appears that they were overwhelmed by the interest the original video generated. I guess it’s first come first served so it’ll probably be a while because I didn’t stumble upon it until pretty late. Bummer!
Technorati Tags: scrybe, web2.0
