We're addicted to stats. Well, at least I am. We're hooked into Google Analytics as well as Mint, as well as a free Crazy Egg account. I want to know everything about our visitors — where they come from, how long they're staying, which pages they visit and which links they use to get to those pages.

The more I know the better I can sculpt our site, and hopefully, get people to where they're going more efficiently. And sell more books. Lots of books.

Until recently, there was one source of traffic we had no real method of quantifying: external links from non-web sources. For example, links in a PDF (like our Poppas sample chapter) or links in a newsletter.

So what I did was go and write a plugin for Mint. A "pepper," in Mint parlance. It's called "Link Spice." You can read all the dirty details here, but essentially it allows us to add two variables to all URLs. Link Spice then searches our logs and parses for those variables and shows us in a few, wide brushstrokes an overview on external traffic.

The pepper is available for free from my website, so if anyone else out there is using Mint and wants to track their external linkage, go grab it.

For an example of it in action, download the Poppas chapter 1 PDF and click on the link on the first or last page. Then check out the URL that it directs you to in your browser.