After putting it off for a long while now, I finally upgraded to version 1.29 of Mint. Initially I planned to upgrade, but instead I decided to drop the MySQL tables and start from scratch, installing only peppers (Mint plugins) that I intend to use.

As I was cruising through the latest peppers at Peppermint Tea, I came across a post that the author of the Pathstats Pepper was giving away 250 copies of it for free on his 25th birthday. His birthday was on July 19th and as of the 26th, he had only given away 165, so I went ahead and snagged my free copy. Even though he normally only charges $3.80 (the price of a Marble Mocha Macchiato at Starbucks), I probably would not have payed to give the plugin a shot. After toying around with it for the last few minutes though, I’m starting to feel the love. Here’s what the Pathstats panel looked like after a few minutes online:

Pathstats Pepper

As you can see, 6 of the 7 visitors shown were “one hit wonders”. They came, they saw, they left. That’s usually the way most search engine visitors behave, which is why I advocate conditional advertising targeted at these types of visitors. If they do happen to wander on to another page of my site, the ads are turned off because the PHP that tells the site whether or not to show ads is based on the referring URL. There is one visitor however who saw more than one page of my site before leaving. Oddly enough, that person came from a query at MSN for “removing popcorn ceilings” and then they browsed around for over 6 minutes. To see the navigation path of any of the users within Pathstats, all you have to do is click on a row to expand it. If you click on the image above, you can see the expanded view of my amazing 6 minute visitor. I can see this little pepper being a handy tool for analyzing site traffic. Sure, Google Analytics can do that, but it’s so bulky and saturated with unnecessary features. That’s why Mint is still my most used method of website stat tracking.