Peppering Mint and filtering referrers
Lately I’ve had quite a few people ask me what Peppers I currently use with Mint and so I thought I’d rattle those off fairly quickly here.
- Fresh View
- Trends Internal
- Trends External
- Session Tracker (link is to archive file; site has been taken down)
- Outclicks
- Download Counter
- FeedBurner Stats
- XXX Strong Mint
Filtering images.google.* referrers
In my initial post about Mint I wrote the following:
There is no way to filter the RSS feed. In other words, there is no way to remove from it things that come up often, but in slightly different contexts (e.g., I get a ton of referrals from Google Images which I couldn’t care less about). Yes, I know of the Referrer Filter Pepper, but it only filters the page view pane, not the RSS feed.
It turns out that this can be resolved rather easily by specifying, in the referrers section of the preferences page, those addresses you want Mint to ignore. The language above the text box is a little confusing and might make you think that the addresses added won’t be filtered out of the RSS feed (Don’t show referrals from the following domains in the Newest Unique Referrers tab…), but I can assure you they are.
Unfortunately, this filtering system doesn’t support wildcards (e.g., images.google.*) and so you have to add each and every address you want to filter (e.g., images.google.cg, images.google.com.hk, etc.). Lucky for you, I’ve been generating a list of all the Google Images domains for quite a while now and am making this list available for download so that you don’t have to do the same.
Simply copy/paste my list into the text box in the referrers section of the preferences page and click Done. That’s it. If you come across some domains that aren’t in the list, please e-mail them to me.
Something tells me that Shaun will create an on/off option in future builds to control the referrers from Google Images (it’s the only thing I filter for and I know a lot of other people are in the same boat; perhaps even Shaun), but until then, this method works like a charm.