If you love tracking your blog’s statistics, there is one piece of software that has had a lot of press, especially today, as Shaun Inman’s Mint gets an upgrade. Shaun talks about the changes on his newly redesigned site, as well as the upgraded design of HaveaMint.com. He also launches a site to track the extensions on mint called Peppermill.

What’s new in Mint 2.0?

• staggered loading of Pepper panes improving Mint page load time
• tons of interface and hierarchy refinements (including support for custom styles)
• improved pane tiling that reclaims wasted screen real estate
• css-based Visits graphs
• a bunch of tabs can now be filtered by timespan
• a new Domains tab added to the Referrers pane groups referrers by domain and sorts by the number of referrers from each domain
• Watched tab of the Pages pane has been expanded to display referrers of Watched pages
• Searches differentiates between image and web searches

Jonathan Snook makes a good point in his post, entitled “Pay to Upgrade?”, where he expresses his shock that everyone assumed this upgrade would be free. It does in fact cost $19 USD per license to upgrade, unless you purchased after January 1st, 2007. To get a whole new license, you are still looking at $30 USD a domain. So if you have ten sites, getting them to the new Mint 2.0, you are looking at between $190 to $300, unless you can get a special volume license from Shaun. Not cheap, but depending on how many Peppers, extensions, work with this new version, it might be worth it, especially for the RSS feed statistics.

RSS Feed Statistics?
One of the new additions to the included Pepper list is Bird Feeder, a tool that watches your various feeds.

From Shaun’s blog:

Your RSS and Atom feeds attract all kinds of colorful wildlife, Bird Feeder is a window onto that activity. It highlights subscription trends across multiple Feeds and clicks on individual Seeds. What’s a seed? That’s bird-ese for an article or link within a feed. Poo-tee-weet?

Bird Feeder is savvy (and a fan of Kurt Vonnegut apparently). Online aggregators usually provide the number of subscribers for whom they fetch your feeds. Bird Feeder takes note of this so numbers should be comparable to hosted services like Feedburner. It even integrates with an updated User Agent 007, adding an additional Readers tab so you can see which tools are being used to subscribe to your feeds.

A very interesting addition, and it says a lot about the types of features that can be added to the software. Not to mention, the new design looks pretty slick.

Check out Mint 2.0.

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