Thomas Pelletier

Four days ago I finally bought Mint, for pelletier.im. I used to use Wordpress’ plug-in for my weblog and Google Analytics for all my other projects. I decided to get rid of Wordpress’ plug-in because of its lack of flexibility and its heavy use of Flash. I didn’t want to come back Analytics because its far too slow: it’s really annoying! Lots of people advised me to use Mint. Well, I was really reluctant to spend $30 for a web-based software bound to a specific domain name. But I have got a brainwave and picked up my calculator and realised that $30 equals €20. Mint became more affordable just like that!

Mint is now running on thomas.pelletier.im! Great. Here is what I like and what I don’t really love with it:

Strength

• Really easy to install. Just set up your database (with your fancy shell script which uses mysql-client — or if you are less geeky just visit your Phpmyadmin page), copy Mint onto your server and magic happens.
• Flexible : Mint comes with few peppers (modules), but you just have to go to the Peppermill, download, copy and install some of them and your Mint gets empowered by more magic powers!
• Realtime : refresh your page (or use a pepper which will do such a nasty task for you) and see your statistics: you don’t have to wait 1 hour or anything else.
• Shaun Inman is very nice and you will never feel alone on Mint’s forum.
• You have the source : if something in Mint bothers you, just load your favourite text editor and go beat some PHP lines of code.

Drawbacks

• Peppers aren’t archived in the Peppermill: I’m looking for FreshView, but as you can see the original website is off and I don’t manage to grab the pepper.
• You can’t display statistics for a chosen sub-domain.
• You can’t tweak the way anonymous users see your Mint page: they can see it, or they can’t.

To put it in a nutshell, Mint is really awesome and I don’t regret buying it but I think I’ll need to hack a bit to get rid of this sub-domain limit.

Minted too.

Photo credits: London Symbols by X it

Or at least I try to. I know my English skills are neither really impressive nor even high. I think I am likely to make progress by practicing. In fact, I hope using English each time I write on the Web will be more efficient than writing every month at school a 300 words long text about poverty or inequalities (or any subject I have nothing to say about). So please, English users, don’t hesitate to pick holes in my posts!

Language is not the only change. As some of you may have noticed, “Kiznet” is now titled “Thomas Pelletier” (far more serious right?) and I put back the “Journalist” theme (which is smarter than the old one). Oh, one last change: the domain name has become thomas.pelletier.im instead of kiznet.fr. Please update your bookmarks!

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