I am setting up a new blog and looked for a widget I could add that would give me the total number of views for a blog post (and it would be nice to find out the number of views in the last X days) and didn't find any.
Is there a quick way of setting this up?
If it is for you to see (i.e. not an on-screen counter, but something you can look at separately): Google analytics, perhaps with feedburner if you have an atom/rss feed.
Adding google analytics is simply a case of adding a few lines of script (that it generates for you); and it gives so much information (not just how many hits, but a proper usage history, referring sites / search terms that people used to find you, physical location by IP, etc). And it is free.
Bob,
Got something for you here. I created it a while back, just never made a post for it. It should be EXACTLY what your looking for.
Check out Al Nyveldt's post Most Popular Posts Extension and Widget. It does what you want in terms of counting. If you're willing to extend BlogEngine.NET, you can fairly easily consume the file his extension produces to display all posts and the number of times they've been viewed. Remember to make it accessible to admins only, if that's what you want.