Get a free RSS widget for your site

This one is for those of you, who have a website and would like to display the contents of an RSS feed on that website. It does not really matter if you want to display your own feeds on a different part of your blog or feeds from other websites.FeedFlash is a nice service that takes feed urls and places them in a nice looking and scrollable widget that can be embedded into websites.

The cool thing is that these widgets are fully customizable, including colors, heading, height and width and so on. I'd say that changing the size of the widget is the most important feature as long as you plan to put it into a sidebar. You provide the address to your feed and the service lets you customize the widget with a preview. After that the code can be copied and added to the code of your website.

Note that the feed will be loaded as an iframe on your website which means that you basically load contents from another site on your website. This should not be a problem most of the time but can become one if the service or site slows down or goes down. There is also a small powered by line at the bottom of the widget.

An alternative for WordPress would be the RSS-Import plugin which can be configured to display only headlines or headlines and content on your WordPress blog.

Update: Head over to the WordPress Plugin directory for a selection of RSS feed related plugins. Here you find lots of plugins that you can install in WordPress to display RSS feed contents in the sidebar or another location on your blog.

WordPress on top of that makes available a widget, via Appearance > Widgets, that you can display on your blog to display the contents of an external RSS feed on it without installing a plugin first.

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