I’ve Gone All Minty!

I hate SPAM!!

It’s just everywhere. You get it in your emails, I’ve had it in my website comments and trackbacks, now they are driving me mad in my website stats.

I think that website statistics are fascinating – it’s so interesting to see what people are looking at and how they get to my website. Referer information has to be the most interesting because it shows what other websites are linking to you and how many people use those links.

AWStats has been the web stats package that I have been using to discover all this interesting information as it comes as part of my hosting package. This has done me fine until about the last year, when I slowly started seeing my results full of strange URL’s containing casino, gambling, poker and viagra related websites – aka referer SPAM!

Over the last year the amount of referer SPAM has grown so much that it’s hard to find the genuine links to my website. I have looked into ways to prevent this data from being recorded in the server logs without any success. One site that did crop up many times during my searches was Mint.

Mint provides a fresh look at your site. It is concise, flexible and timely. And to sweeten the deal, this delicious little bundle of PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript joy is referrer-spam-proof.

Mint is different than the usual web site statistic packages that you get, it has a nice clean interface and gives you all the information that you need clearly on one page. It has also been getting loads of rave reviews from fellow bloggers.

I have to confess that I was initially put off getting Mint due to its $30 license cost. To me it seemed a lot of money for a webpage that looks, well quite basic in appearance. As time went on and my referer spam got worse, I kept hearing more and more about Mint in some of the various blogs that I read. Could it really that good? So I spent some time researching the produt properly and having a look at the Demo installation of Mint.

In the end, I decided to go for it and registered. After a quick install and a bit of code added to my website I was up and running in no time. After only 5-10 minutes of use, I have to say that Mint is an absolutely fantastic product and is worth every penny. It just goes to show that you shouldn’t judge things by first impressions!

One of the great features of Mint is the expandability using plugins (called Peppers) that allow you to get extra functionality. Brilliant, just brilliant!

Go on Have a Mint and say goodbye to referer SPAM!