Adsense For Feeds, Awareness API, Oh My!

September 25, 2008

I’ve recently moved Bwana.org’s RSS feed to utilize Google’s Adsense for Feeds program which allows advertising embeds within your RSS feed. I was reluctant at first since I didn’t want to hand over control of my feed to FeedBurner. Anyway, after I got a setup with Adsense for Feeds, I ran into an issue which took some time to resolve. I could not figure out how to utilize all the nifty features of FeedBurner with my Adsense for Feeds account.

How is that you ask?

Well, with Adsense for Feeds, the feeds are hosted on a different domain than FeedBurner’s even though they use the same technology. FeedBurner’s feeds are hosted at http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourwebsite, while Adsense for Feeds accounts are hosted on http://feedproxy.google.com/yourwebsite. There’s been a bunch of controversy on how Google is handling the “switchover” to the new domain (it is currently a manual process which is not perfect).

My problem was, I didn’t know how to access the details of my “FeedBurner”, Adsense enabled feed. I didn’t know how to log in to FeedBurner since I didn’t already have an account there. The Adsense for Feeds section of Google Adsense shows a different set of options than what you see on FeedBurner. The main thing I needed was to enable the Awareness API so that I could show my feed count on my blog. By default, Adsense for Feeds accounts have the Awareness API disabled. So after scouring Google for solutions I finally stumbled upon it myself. The solution is:

Log into your Google Account at http://www.google.com/accounts using the same credentials as your Adsense account.
From there click the FeedBurner link:
You are automatically authenticated to FeedBurner with your Adsense for Feeds credentials.