Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Bleg: help me find the RSS widget I need

I'd like to add an RSS widget to my Gun Rights Examiner articles to promote the other GREs and, incidentally, give them an easy way to promote my column at the same time. The GREs do something like this now, but manually--they're updating the list of the latest GRE headlines at the end of each post by pasting the list from their last post, then checking all 12 of the other GRE's, then copying the headline and making a new hyperlink for anyone who's got a new article up since last time. It's time-consuming and clunky, but it works.

But in the spirit of "The Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail" I'd like to use an RSS widget to do the same job. What I want is something like the one that Blogger provides--you can see the "Blog List" off to the left there. It shows the newest title for each of the RSS feeds I've added, and whenever someone posts something new, it goes to the top of the widget. That is exactly what I want, but I can't find it (free is best, of course, but it doesn't have to be free as long as I know it's going to do what I want) anywhere else. Anyone out there know where to find such a thing?

In the meantime, I'm using the closest runner-up here on the blog. This SpringWidgets device is great in most ways (I especially like being able to customize the header image and the colors, although I made my header image exactly the width and height they recommended and it still gets cut off. The only thing that doesn't work for me is that, although this widget says it's meant to display multiple feeds, the reader has to reach up and click the "Menu" button to see the list of feeds, and then click on each feed individually. That is fine for someone who uses it to aggregate feeds he chose himself to read every day, but it's no good for promotion, because the user won't know that they're supposed to do that. HALP.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This sounds like a job for eminent programmer Rob "No Pants" Allen.

Drop him a line and see if he'd be interested in building something that would fit your needs.