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I have been using mint to keep track of website visitor statistics ever since Shaun Inman released it. One of the cool things about mint is that you can install different plugins to extend features in mint. In the mint world these plugins are called “pepper“. I came across a pepper that would allow users to track myspace visitors and display the results with mint. After a few quick steps I actually had it working. This pepper is really rather simple but at the same time genius (at least I think so).

Myspace does not allow users to include/embed any scripts in their profiles for security reasons. However this pepper does not require you to include any scripts in your profile. what this pepper does is use a 1px by 1px size image file (that you include in your profile’s about me section) with a source that points back to your mint/pepper installation. For ex:

http://www.yoursite.com/mint/pepper/myspacepepper/image.png

Here is where things get tricky though; In the same directory that contains the image file is a .htaccess file which changes the image.png file’s header to that of a PHP script! What this does is basically make the .png act like a php file while still retaining a .png extension. Because this .png is not really an image, but a PHP file with an extension that has been changed to “.png”, everytime the image is called you are really calling the PHP script and myspace doesn’t even notice. Bingo!

Because this pepper is not really myspace specific, you can include this same image tag on all of your different social networking profiles. Basically if you can add an image to your profile, you can use this pepper. Every visit will appear as a myspace visit though in mint. To solve this, I created a pepper for each profile I wanted to track, and then installed them each individually so now I can see which profile gets the most traffic.

Now for the bad news: This pepper does not identify users by profile id’s; instead it gathers the users IP address which it then converts to a general location as well as records the users duration of stay at your profile.

This is great for bands who would like to see in which general area of the world most of their fans live.

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• Myspace Crossposter Plugin for Wordpress