NOTE: This post was written many months ago under the erroneous assumption that caching Mint’s JavaScript was a good idea (for Y-Slow compliance, performance, et al); however, after a brief chat with the man himself, Shaun Inman, I was quickly informed that this was a bad idea: caching Mint JavaScript files will cause Mint to stop functioning. But, for what it’s worth, and for the sake of retaining potentially useful information, I present the original article here for your amusement.. </note>

Recently, I spent some time addressing a few of the performance issues pointed out by Yahoo!’s very useful YSlow extension for Firebug. Working on performance tip #3, Add an Expires or a Cache-Control Header, I encountered some difficulty while trying to get the JavaScript used by Mint to cache as desired. Apparently, the HTAccess directives used to cache my other scripts do not effect the two PHP-generated JavaScript files used by Mint. Although I am not entirely certain, I suspect that these files are not being cached along with other scripts because the way in which they are called via query string parameter (Apache is far from perfect when it comes to dealing with anything associated with query strings). In any case, I really wanted to have these Mint scripts cached by the browser, so I ended up editing two files in the Mint core to make it work. For those of you struggling with the same dilemma, here’s how I did it..

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Last week, I finally got around to upgrading to Mint 2.14. The new version is quite impressive, and well worth the time (and cash) spent upgrading. In the process, however, one of my favorite, most heavily used bookmarklet things ceased to work.

Before the upgrade, I had been enjoying the highly useful Refresh-All bookmarklet by Jonathan Snook. Snook’s Mint-refresh bookmarklet made it super-easy to update all Mint data panels without having to refresh the entire page. Using the bookmarklet is much faster that reloading the browser, and there is even an alternate version that will refresh panels automatically at user-specified intervals.

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After switching Perishable Press to its current home at A Small Orange, I began noticing an unusual problem with referrer data displayed in Mint. Specifically, the first item recorded in the XXX Strong Mint data panel — for both “Most Recent” and “Repeat” views — displayed several thousand hits for various site resources, all from the following IP address:

127.255.255.255 
zxw59eit.emirates.net.ae

Apparently, this particular location represents an invalid “loopback address.” The requested resources appear valid, indicating typical traffic patterns, but the loopback address is not the actual referrer. This issue was preventing Mint from accurately recording mountains of vital referral data.

Researching this issue reveals that the underlying problem involves the switching of a Mint installation between a 32-bit server and a 64-bit server. Installing Mint on either type of server without switching to the other should not trigger this problem. It is the switch from one to another that results in the generation of the loopback address.

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Mint As many statistics freaks already know, Mint is an excellent way to keep a close eye on your site’s visitors, referrers, most requested resources, and much more. Even better, Mint’s functionality is easily enhanced via a growing collection of free extensions referred to as "Peppers". Peppers provide Mint functionality for a wide range of statistical operations, including everything from geographical IP information to nice, graphical summaries of collected data.

While we have not tried every Pepper available today, we have managed to incorporate an extremely powerful arsenal of statistical weaponry that keeps us well-informed about our site’s online activity. For Mint users, the following list of Pepper extensions is essential for complete statistical analysis..

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