Download statistics for package registered on Pypi can be obtained, in RSS format, by subscribing your favorite RSS reader (e.g. GoogleReader) with the following:

{{{
 http://www.jldupont.com/services/pypirss/rss/$package_name
}}}

'''Example'''

[http://www.jldupont.com/services/pypirss/rss/pypp]

----

Q: I tried http://www.jldupont.com/services/pypirss/rss/lockfile but got an error.  Does something need to be set up for each package?

A: There is no downloads available for this package, hence no statistics on downloads.
  ERROR: Error accessing "downloads" attribute from package[lockfile]

Q: You mean no downloads since you implemented this feature, or no downloads
at all?

A: Sorry for the confusion: the XMLRPC interface to Pypi returns that an error code to the effect that no 'package_data' is available. If I look at the page on Pypi [http://pypi.python.org/pypi/lockfile], I don't see one either i.e. a download URL is made available BUT there are no "uploaded files" to Pypi.

Q. Interesting.  People tell me they use lockfile, and it actually has a score
listed when you search PyPI for "lockfile".  Collecting download stats must be a relatively recent phenomenon.

----

[http://wiki.python.org/moin/PyPiXmlRpc Pypi XMLRPC]. I must say that the XMLRPC interface could be augmented to make it easier to derive per-package-version statistics.

Thanks.  Got it now:

{{{
>>> server.release_urls('lockfile', '0.7')
[]
>>> server.release_urls('lockfile', '0.6')
[]
>>> server.release_urls('lockfile', '0.5')
[]
>>> server.release_urls('lockfile', '0.4')
[]
>>> server.release_urls('lockfile', '0.3')
[]
>>> server.release_urls('lockfile', '0.2')
[{'has_sig': False, 'upload_time': <DateTime '20071209T14:31:52' at 81de40c>, 'comment_text': '', 'python_version': 'source', 'url': 'http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/l/lockfile/lockfile-0.2.tar.gz', 'md5_digest': 'd5fb6d5c39a791c6fd218917707651eb', 'downloads': 163, 'filename': 'lockfile-0.2.tar.gz', 'packagetype': 'sdist', 'size': 9538}]
>>> server.release_urls('lockfile', '0.1')
[]
}}}

Kind of a weird download distribution, but it explains things (I think).  Delete all this stuff when you tire of seeing it... -- Skip

I forget to mention that the service only fetches the stat for the latest package release on record. -- jld.