Update from March 18th, 2011:

GENiALi e-mailed me with an issue that an exception was thrown at startup because the extension was unable to parse a boolean. He sent me a fix which is now included in 1.2.

As you might have noticed, BlogEngine.NET 2.0 is released recently. Quite a while ago, I wrote an extension for the 1.x version of BlogEngine called Detailed Download Counter. For what it’s worth, it was quite “successful”, at least for me

During the upgrade, I decided to drop several extensions I had used blindly over the years. I could drop most of them, but the knowledge of how many times a file has been download cannot be expressed in money.

Therefore, I gently decided to make the old version compatible with the new version of BlogEngine and share it with you:

DetailedDownloadCounter-1.1.zip (7.00 kb) [Downloads: 682]

DetailedDownloadCounter-1.2.zip (7.07 kb) [Downloads: 620]

Recently, a new version of BlogEngine.NET was released. Since this was a major update, I had to consider the following things:

1. Do you really want to support the custom theme?
   It always took me a lot of time to customize the theme of the blog and make sure it was up-to-date with all the new features. Also, the text wasn’t very nice to read (pretty small), so the answer to this question is no. Let’s just use the standard theme, it will always be up-to-date. 
2. Do you really want to support all the extensions?
   Not all of them, but since I write lots of topics about code, I really need to enhanced code display. But, what seems, this is now integrated into BlogEngine . So, up to the next thing, I really love the Detailed Download Counter, maybe because I wrote it myself, but I just want to track downloads so I know which downloads are successful. Therefore, I had to “convert” that one to the new format. I will soon post a new update on the counter.

Furthermore, I wanted to try out AdSense. I know it doesn’t work that well on a software development related blog, but I want to get acquainted with it, so I found the Adsense Injector extension. It doesn’t work for now, so I’ll take a look at it ASAP and post fixes if required.

Upgrading to the new blog (including uploading the files and checking into source control) took me about 1 hour, so I really recommend all BlogEngine users to upgrade!

Lately, I have been posting some source code and I wanted to know how many times the source code was downloaded. I searched the internet and quickly found an Extensions page on the official BlogEngine.NET website. I noticed there were several different download counters available. I will list them here shortly with the cons and the pros.

1) Counter Extension by RTur

• Stores every download (so advanced statistics are available)
• The overview is not an overview (counts per file are not available)

2) Simply Download Counter by Al Nyveldt

• Download count is displayed in the blog posts itself
• No settings available to determine who can view the download count
• Downloads are not stored separate (only the number of downloads per file)

3) File Download Tracker by Chris Blakenship

• It shows a good overview which file is downloaded how many times
• Downloads are not stored seapare (only the last download date and the number of downloads per file)

None of these counters could provide the functionality I really wanted. I simply wanted a counter that allowed me to decide at run-time whether I wanted anonymous users to be able to view the number of downloads. Also, I wanted a more structured way of storing and viewing the downloads per file. Since the original extensions didn't too look difficult, I decided to dive into the world of BlogEngine.NET extensions.

What I have developed is a solution that fits my needs (and probably others as well). The Detailed Download Counter saves the information per file, but also stores the timestamp, user agent and user host. This gives anyone the ability to create more advanced statistics. For the moment, I have only implemented a grid which simply shows an overview of the files downloaded and the details of a file. To get a grip of the current implementation, please view the image below:

To install the Detailed Download Counter extension, simply extract the zip file to the root or your BlogEngine.NET application. 

DetailedDownloadCounter.zip (6.69 kb) [Downloads: 1158]