Blogger Posting Stats

Today I did some coding 4 fun :) I haven't done so from home in a lot of time, but I just couldn't resist. I couldn't find a way to automatically get the number of my posts in Blogger for the year 2005. So I decided to automate it myself with the side effect to get a better feel of VS.NET 2005.

I found an excellent article at CodeProject about using Atom API with Blogger. In fact, I just had to find where to hook my code for counting the posts, since in the sample app they were already downloaded and loaded in classes. Initially I thought that I should do something more generic with posting stats, so I tried to serialize the post in XML. That's how I would be able to manipulate posts independently from their extraction (which is a kind of a slow process). I got it working but I found that not all public properties of a post get serialized. Apparently the method GetXml() in NBlog.Atom class is the cause, the XML serialization somehow used it behind the scenes. Later I realized that the serialization can deal only with read-write properties, and there were a bunch of read-only ones. Another peculiarity I found was that only the last 100 posts were returned.

I left my initial plan and just printed out the number of posts and a list of the dates. The total number was 102, which I find not bad for this year.

I wonder why I couldn't find any online services to give me these kind of stats and some more. I expect ones that cover the frequency of posting, comments count etc. and of course they should be presented in nice charts. I actually found a service called MeasureMap. I gave them my e-mail but I have not received an invitation yet. It looks promising, though.