Convenience is one of the general features of the new WordPress 2.+ versions. Adding stuff to your sidebar has never been easier. Add-ons that had been handled by external plugins in the earlier versions of WordPress are now built-in. They can also be added into your sidebar through drag and drop.

One of these built-in drag and drop features is the RSS feed widget. I’ve just added it myself on the second sidebar, which now features an RSS feed of my Top 10 EntreCard Droppers.

If your WordPress installation is at version 2 and up, you should be able to see the RSS widget when you click on Design > Widgets on your WordPress administration screen.

Once you’ve added it to the sidebar of your choice, you can then edit the widget to show the RSS feed that you would like to appear on your sidebar, in my case it looks like this:

When you’ve entered the necessary data, click on “Change” and then “Save Changes”. When you go to the front end (homepage) of your site, you should be able to see something similar to what I have under the Communities Badges on this site.

You can have more than one RSS feed on your sidebar, just keep dragging that RSS widget into the spot where you want them to appear and presto!

Similar stories

• Customize Your Permalink Structure (4)
• DIY Branding can be Fun! (0)
• Free blog hosting (2)

11 Comments on Add an RSS Feed on your WordPress Sidebar

Jason on Sat, 7th Jun 2008 4:03 am


Wordpress is the absolute best CMS I have ever seen. I have not made use of the RSS feeds on my sidebar yet, but I am going to give it a try.

Jason’s last blog post: Web Design Trick: Javascript Column Heights

Bambit on Sat, 7th Jun 2008 10:19 am


Hi Jason, been to your site, it’s one of the neatest wordpress sites I’ve ever been on. I took out the original feed I first put into my sidebar and replaced it with my Top Ten EC Droppers, reason being the old rss feed I put in did not update as often as the actual site it was coming from did. Kinda weird, come to think of it.

Jason on Sat, 7th Jun 2008 6:54 pm


Bambit,

Thanks for the compliment on my wordpress site. I like the way the EC Dropper works. Weird that your RSS feed didn’t update. Check out Search Commander and you will see a nice RSS feed on the right hand side. If you click on the link underneath it, it allows you to create and edit the look of any RSS feed. Its actually a very cool tool. Talk to you later.

Jason’s last blog post: Web Design Trick: Javascript Column Heights

cooltravelguide.com on Sat, 21st Jun 2008 8:00 pm


This was very useful info. I’m going to put that RSS widget on use right away!

cooltravelguide.com’s last blog post: Travelocity?

Rampa on Tue, 24th Jun 2008 2:27 am


Cheers for the insight, There are some posts I found quite interesting, in this blog.

John on Thu, 4th Sep 2008 2:12 am


Thanks for the post

How can you decide how many lines of content are added after selecting “display content item”?

Bambit on Thu, 4th Sep 2008 7:05 am


Hi John!

In the default WP rss widget, the content of the rss feed item itself is the description that the blog owner has written for his blog. This can either be just a phrase or an entire paragraph, the widget displays whatever is there if you select the Display Item Content checkbox.

The default WP rss widget does not give you much control over how the description is displayed.

You might want to try, as Jason commented above, the widget that you can find on the right hand navigation of the site http://www.searchcommander.com/ . You can read about it here: http://www.feedcommander.com/ and try it out from the link that they give you.

Have fun!

Tom Murphy on Sun, 9th Nov 2008 1:42 pm


Interesting post, and I’d love to get the Bonanzle widget on my blog.. but my blog does not have a sidebar. Any way to make the widget work in a non-sidebar blog theme?

Tom

Tom Murphy´s last blog post: How To Preserve Newsprint for Archive or Display

Bambit on Sun, 9th Nov 2008 5:13 pm


Hi Tom, you can choose to feature the widget on its own page, or you can configure it to load as a popup from a page. Which blog did you mean, because encore-ephemera.com does have sidebars, so you won’t have problems displaying the Bonanzle widget there.

Robin A on Thu, 4th Dec 2008 9:05 pm


Would like to quite my day job, and just work from home.. There has to be a better life out there some where! Everyone have a wonderful Christmas!

bollykings on Sun, 8th Feb 2009 11:04 pm


I was planning to add a feed from another authority news site – this was just what i needed.

thanks a lot!

Tell me what you're thinking...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!

Name (required)

Email Address (required)

Website

Speak your mind

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail