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FeedBurner API

Developer Guide

Complete references for major APIs are linked from this page. You may wish to start with Activating/Authenticating Access to FeedBurner APIs below, however, in order to verify you can access the APIs you require.

FeedFlare API

The FeedFlare API (FlareAPI) allows anyone to develop new FeedFlare units that tag, share, and interact with syndicated content, wherever it goes. Using FlareAPI to create new units can be as simple as displaying a link to related content, or as powerful as incorporating another web service. (English to Spanish translation of a blog posting, for example.)

FlareAPI is open to anyone and requires no registration or authentication to use. Get started with it today by studying these resources:

Feed Awareness API

The FeedBurner Awareness API (AwAPI) allows publishers of FeedBurner feeds to reuse the detailed traffic statistics we capture for any of their feeds. Third-party applications and web services that consume feeds can leverage this data to provide useful feed awareness statistics to potential subscribers. FeedBurner captures traffic data at an overall level for every feed. Feeds that use our premium Total Stats PRO service have access to much more detailed data at the individual item level. This data includes "resyndication" information, which is very useful for determining where and how a feed is being consumed.

Feed Management API

The FeedBurner Management API (MgmtAPI) allows publishers of FeedBurner feeds to create and manage feeds within their FeedBurner accounts. MgmtAPI permits remote access to FeedBurner's basic account management capabilities by third party applications without requiring direct use of the existing FeedBurner.com website. Using MgmtAPI, third parties can completely re-present FeedBurner's feed creation and management capabilities.

Activating/Authenticating Access to FeedBurner APIs

In order to make use of FeedBurner APIs, you must understand how each is protected from unauthorized use. Both Awareness API (AwAPI) and Management (MgmtAPI) use authentication to permit only authorized users to modify feeds and view statistics info. In addition, AwAPI will retrieve statistics for specific feeds for any public request without authentication if the account owning those feeds has activated AwAPI support for those feeds.

Activating Public Access for AwAPI
By default, AwAPI access to FeedBurner feeds is only possible via authentication. You must activate public AwAPI for each feed to return traffic data to any anonymous public request (An example of which is Podnova's "FeedBurner Top 40".) To activate AwAPI, sign in to your FeedBurner account and visit the Publicize tab on the details page for the feed whose awareness data you want to access. Click Awareness API on the service menu that appears on the left side of the page. On the Awareness API form that appears, click Activate. FeedBurner will respond with a standard error on any attempt to access data for a feed that has not been activated. (See below for details on error codes.) If you don't wish to activate AwAPI statistics for general public consumption, you may instead use authenticated access to limit AwAPI access to your own, private use.

Using Authentication for Private AwAPI and MgmtAPI Access
We currently support two different mechanisms for user authentication, listed below. For approved MgmtAPI partners, FeedBurner also supports an additional parameter that can be passed into any function call named partnerUser. When the partnerUser parameter is provided, it serves as a partner-specific "partitioning" of all of the feeds associated with the partner. These partner users are just an opaque marker for FeedBurner, and no explicit account registration needs to take place.

In the future, we may support WSSE as an alternative user authentication mechanism, but we believe HTTP Basic Authentication over SSL is a viable authentication scheme. We can always screen based upon the originating IP address for approved partners as an additional meaure of security.

HTTP Parameter Authentication

This insecure method for user authentication involves passing the user id and password as request arguments. Because this information will be "in the clear" for GET requests, parameter authentication should only be used with development/test accounts.

To use this mechanism, you must submit the following two arguments with an API call:

Parameter Description
user The FeedBurner user id. Must represent an active FeedBurner account.
password The user account password in clear text.

Sample Parameter Request

http://api.feedburner.com/management/1.0/GetFeed?
user=jshaftoe&password=3L1Z4&id=33378

HTTP Basic Authentication

Another mechanism for user authentication is to use HTTP authenication. While this is an insecure method when connecting to an HTTP endpoint, it is secure when connecting to HTTPS URLs since the headers will be transmitted over SSL.

To use this method, include the Authorization header that specifies the Basic authentication scheme and a Base64 encoding of user:password.

Sample Authenticated Request Header

Authorization: Basic QWxhZGRpbjpvcGVuIHNlc2FtZQ==