Build My Site for Free

Hi.  Welcome to BuildMySiteForFree.com.  Today’s tutorial is about how to use the RSS widget.  Now the RSS widget displays
content from another blog in your sidebar or widget area, and what it usually is, is posts or updates from another website or blog.  So if you did see our video on changing the WordPress development blog on our Dashboard, you would have seen that we change the RSS feed to being updates from WordPress to updates from the New York Times.

So to go about adding this RSS widget to your blog, you want to do the same thing that you would do to add a widget, and you come down to appearance on your navigation menu.  And you scroll down to where it says “Widgets” and open up the widgets page. So as you can see here, we have all of our available widgets.  On the right side, we have the widget areas or sidebars where we can actually have our widgets displayed.

And what you want to do here is scroll down to where it says, “RSS,” and you want to drag and drop this item in the primary widget area or any area you choose. Once you have done so, this box will come up where you need to enter the URL and some other information.  So what
I want to do is I’m going to add the URL, the RSS feed URL rather, to WordPress.  So when people come to my blog, they can see on my sidebar the widget for WordPress updates so other people that have WordPress can get updated and find more news about WordPress through
my blog.

So what I’m going to do is copy and paste that link right into the URL, so you will go ahead and do that with your RSS feed URL link.  And then the next few items are optional, but I’m going to go ahead and add them.  So for this, I’m going to type in WordPress updates.  Then you could choose how many items you want displayed.  So I could have up to 20, but I’m just going to scroll down and make it that three items will be displayed on my widget.

Then you have three more optional choices.  You can have it display the item content, which means it will either give you an excerpt or a summary of what that specific update is.  You can choose to have the author shown, and you can also choose to have the date shown.  So I’ll just go ahead and make the date be shown.  And once you are done, you want to click “Save” and it will save your changes.

Now just to show you what it looks like if we come onto my blog, you will see right up here in the sidebar,we have our WordPress update widget with the title, the three that I chose to have shown, and the date for each one of them. And any time you want to go back and edit these or even take this off or change the URL link, you can go ahead and do so, and this is how you do it.

So thank you for watching our video on using the RSS widget.