Current Version: Trends 3.06
Meet Trends, a Pepper developed by Brett DeWoody and Ronald Heft. Trends is the Pepper to use with Mint. Trends analyzes your website’s usage over a set period of time. You can configure how long you want to consider data current, and what period of time to compare it against. With its configurable time ranges, Trends is perfect for any site, big or small.
Screenshot
Features
Trends comes with several panes and tabs to get the data you want.
The Internal Pane
The Internal Pane is all about what’s popular on your site at any given moment. It doesn’t matter how they got there, its what they’re looking at which is key. Use the Internal Pane to track the popularity of pages on your site.
The Popular Tab
The Popular tab is your one stop source for the overall usage of your site. In this tab you’ll see your most popular pages sorted by the number of hits they received in the interval you specify. A percent will also be given to compare how well it’s performing over the previous time span. If the page is new to your site, New! will be displayed.
The Best Tab
The Best tab is where you go to see the most popular pages on your site which are increasing in popularity. If the page existed in the previous time period and is gaining popularity, you’ll find it here.
The Worst Tab
Although most people don’t like to admit it, you can’t stay popular forever. The Worst tab will keep track of those pages which existed in the previous time span and are now losing popularity. Use this tab to find out how bad it is.
The New Tab
The New tab is your guide to finding out how all of your newly created pages are doing. This tab will display pages which did not exist in the previous time period and now have a hit. This tab will also tell you when that first hit occurred, so you know how long it took for someone to find that page on your site.
The Old Tab
As time progresses pages will no longer exist on your site, or will become so unpopular they’re not receiving hits anymore. Use this tab to track pages that use to be getting hits on your site, but for one reason or another have stopped. This tab will also tell you when the last hit occurred, making it easier for you to determine what has gone wrong.
The Watched Tab
Need to monitor a specific page? Use Mint’s Watched Page feature and keep track of that page using the Watched tab. The Watched tab includes all of the features of the Popular tab.
The External Pane
Page popularity isn’t the only thing on your site. How people get to your site is just as important. Use the External Pane to track the methods which people get to your site.
The Quick View Tab
Just because you have visitors doesn’t always mean they’re loyal visitors. It’s important to know the methods that people find your site, so you can judge just how loyal your visitors are. Use the Quick View tab to track direct visitors (they manually typed in your site, or came from a bookmark), referrer visitors (they came because someone recommended your site to them), and search visitors (they came because you may have something they want).
The Referrers Tab
The Referrers tab is here for you to find out who’s recommended your site to others. It follows the same rules as the Popular tab, so you should be right at home.
The Searches Tab
You guessed it, the Search tab tracks the searches people used to find your site. It operates just like the Popular and Referrers tabs.
The History Dropdown
Want to find out exactly how well something performed? The History Dropdown will show you the history of a page, referrer, or search’s performance over your specified comparison interval. Along with the raw numbers you also get a mini graph, allowing you to quickly judge the most popular internal. History is available on the Popular, Best, Worst, Referrers, and Searches tabs.
Download Trends
Current Version: 3.06
Released: 2007-05-06
Compatible With Mint 2.0+
Still have Mint 1.1? Download Trends 2.03, the last version compatible with Mint 1.1.
F.A.Q.
Q: I only want the Internal Pane or External Pane. Can I hide the other one?
A: Sure you can. Mint has this functionality built in. Just go to your preferences and look at the Pane Order section (very bottom left column). From there you can drag either the Trends Internal Pane or the Trends External Pane to the “Disabled” section. Now click “Done” on the bottom left.
Q: What does New! and No Hits mean?
A: New! is displayed if the page has made its first appearance in your Mint database. This may not necessarily mean it’s a new page; it just might not have received visits for a while. No Hits is displayed when the page hasn’t received any hits in the secondary time range but has received hits in the past.
29 Comments
The more I use Trends, the more I realize this is what I really wanted from Mint. This is a fantastic tool and I appreciate the time you and Brett spend on it!
Awesome Pepper! Thanks!
But… and you know there’s always a but… The bulk of my ‘referrers’ are from Google Images. Shouldn’t those be counted as ’searches’?
Also, on a side-note, the ‘name’, ‘email’, and ‘website’ labels inside of the form fields of this Reply form don’t seem to show up in Safari (2.0.3). I just thought you would like to know.
I have the same Google Images problem, so that’s why Trends supports the ignored referrers list. Just add the Google Images domains to the ignored referrers list in your Mint preferences. The Mint forum has a nice list to start with.
Unfortunately Google Images can’t be added to the searches because that’s up to Mint to decide what’s a search and what isn’t. Personally I believe that Google Images aren’t a search either, since they’re finding an image on your site, not content.
Regarding the comment text labels in Safari, I’m aware of the issue. It’s a limitation of Safari; Safari doesn’t support image backgrounds as other browsers due. It’s annoying and I use Safari also, so hopefully I can come up with something eventually.
Awesome tip! Thanks! That makes my refferer list a lot more useful.:razz:
Oh by the way, I now have comment labels for Safari. They can’t be displayed inside the textbox like other browsers, but at least people will know what the fields are.
I am using Trends 2.01. It works great - but I just noticed today that my downloads were not being tracked. I then decided to uninstall Trends and suddenly the downloads were being tracked again.
I am using Downloads Counter and DLoads - it affected both.
I hope this helps…
Matthew
I’m using Downloads Counter 1.2, and Trends 2.01. Both are working great.
Matthew Delmarter, sorry I didn’t see your comment until today. With Trends installed can you append ?errors to your Mint page and report any errors generated by */pepper/brettdewoody/trends/class.php?
Awesome, awesome plugin.
I was wanting a plugin just like this, and it does much more than I had dreamed of.
Fantastic! very helpful. Many thanks!
This looks awesome. Very very very awesome. How hard would it be to create a version of Trends for SlimStat (based of shauns short stat plugin)? SlimStat is better for me because its free and easier to look at (all the whizz in mint drives me bonkers after you look at it for too long)…
Ciao,
Dan
This isn’t free?
Trends is 100% free. However, Mint, the program Trends runs on, is not free and costs $30 per website.
Installed 2.02. Works like a charme! Thanks!
Uploaded it as described, however I never see the Install button for the pepper?????????
Joe, did you get it to install? Sorry I didn’t respond sooner. For some reason I’m no longer getting emails when someone posts a comment.
Not showing up in the Mint install section for me either. Ive even tried uninstalling everything else
matthew, Trends is in the following directory, correct? /mint/peppers/brettdewoody/trends/
Just overwrote my trends folder with version 3, only to be told by Mint that it was now missing and did I want to uninstall it. In a fit of stupidity I uninstalled (losing my data), which got me no where because Mint still thinks there’s no trends pepper, as there’s no option to install it.
Anthony, please report your issue on the Mint Troubleshooting forum. Shaun will be able to help you then. I can tell you now, there is no way Trends can remove your data. It analyzes data and does not own any table values in the Mint database.
Nice! It’s lovely!
Guys, my Install button didn’t show in the preferences either. Go check the permissions on the files withing the trends pepper directory… mine were not readable by the webserver and they therefore cannot be used by Mint.
I changed perms for all thoses files to “o+r” and then the install worked flawlessly. I’m not sure if this is something that can be addressed in the zip file that the pepper is distributed in? i.e. set perms for “others” to read before zipping them?
Thanks,
Rob
I upgraded from Mint 2.02 to 2.03. It then told me that there is a new version of Trends, which I installed. After that Mint only gave me a blank screen. I figured out that when I delete the Trends folder Mint started working again. Version 2.03 (of Trends) works fine though. Anyone else expierencing this?
I love this Pepper, but I’m hoping you can fix some basic math and counting issues.
For example, my current screen tells me that Page A has 99 hits, but when I click on it, I get 91 hits for the past seven days and 97 hits for the seven days previous to that. It tells me that the page is up 1 percent.
There appear to be two problems here:
1) 99 does not equal 91.
2) The up-1-percent is wrong, whichever number it’s using. 99/97 is up 2 percent; 91/97 is down 6 percent.
Another example: Page B lists 23 hits, and 23 hits in the past seven days. The previous seven days, it was 69. Down 75 percent, it says. So we don’t have the discrepancy between the main view and the past-seven-days view, but we do have a math problem. 23/69 is down 67 percent, not 75 percent.
I’d love to see these bugs fixed or — if they’re not bugs — have the methodology explained.
Thanks again!
Hello,
I heard so many good things about trends, so I decided to install it. But, cannot find the downloadable zip file! When I click on “Download Trends 3.06″ it takes me to “http://haveamint.com/peppermill/pepper/25/trends/”
What am I doing wrong?
Thanks in advance.
Noor
Yes, Noor, that’s correct. You have to download Trends through the Mint Peppermill. There is a download link on the page that follows or you can use the following link to download Trends 3.06 directly.
Hi Ronald ! Thx for that great plugin. Actually I would have liked to know the trends for search engines too. Knowing if there were more searches coming for a day to another or from a week to another… Is it possible ? I asked the question to Shaun but he never really answered my question…
Thanks very much for your help !
Fran6
Fran6, I can’t see any reason why this wouldn’t be possible. Mint stores all that information in the database and it could easily be retried with some proper analysis. I’ll add that feature to my list of possible things to add to Trends.
Thanks Ronald, very nice from you !
I don’t understand why there is no pepper that does that already, except the old Referrer Aggregator. That is something every free stats app has… I wish I could code !!! 
Thanks again !
Fran6
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