Last week, with a heavy heart, I removed the Mint Bird Feeder plugin from my site which effectively disconnected my site from providing ‘Mint’ the analytics for one final time. I was left with no choice and here’s why I did what I did.
I remember clearly, I was mesmerized by Mint when it was launched in the last decade. I’m talking about a pre-social media era where blogging was the absolute norm in reaching out to the world. But what seemed important to me was the analytics part. This was the time when Google had not yet launched their Analytics product which gave me raw numbers on page views, geographical visits, etc. I had other analytics software at my disposal which helped me feel the pulse of my audience and to gauge the popularity of my writing. So when Mint was developed and launched by Shaun Inman I bought the product without thinking over it twice.
Last week things started going downhill. I wasn’t able to log into my website Dashboard and I began to worry, that’s when I got in touch with Bluehost and asked them to take a look. It was found that the ‘Mint Bird Feeder’ plug-in was the root cause of the issue and they deactivated it pronto. I was aware that the product development of Mint has ceased with Shaun moving on to other ventures and I did not want to compromise the security of my site and so I removed it completely. Furthermore, the developer of the said plugin hadn’t updated it in over 2 years.
Quite frankly, I had a wonderful time with Mint and some third-party plugins (branded as ‘Peppermint’) as long as they lasted. Given the obvious vagaries of the programming world, I took up the challenge of installing Mint and succeeded, until Google Analytics came along and disrupted the fragmented web analytics product industry forever, in the process, creating an entirely new segment of ‘digital marketing’ and ‘SEO’! But I’ll always be thankful to Shaun for giving me an amazing product experience with Mint and Peppermill. Goodbye, and good luck!