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How to pull your blog stats from medium with C# and .NET

Since Medium’s stats are limited to 90 days and to enable deeper analysis you might want to pull the stats into your own system. Luckily there is a (hidden) http API.

Actually that API is not that hidden, it’s the same URL than the stats website:

https://medium.com/{yourHandle}/stats

The only difference is that we need to add the right Accept header to the request to return a JSON object instead of the HTML page:

Accept: application/json

The last part is authorization: Medium is using cookies for this specifically there are 2 values that need to be provided as Cookie in the request:

sid, uid

Those two values can be easily retrieved when opening the stats page in a browser and then inspecting the cookie using the browser’s developer tools:

With this information at hand we can start implementing a .NET Console Application that consumes this API.

#1 Create a HttpClient configured with the cookies, request header and base address setup:

#2 Provide a simple set of records to facilitate deserialization of the response into typed objects:

#3 As last step we need to implement a loop to query the API as it’s using paging:

And we’re already done! This should give us a list of all the posts for a given handle to use in our own apps: