Blake Schwendiman's Blog and Blook

As promised, I have developed a gadget that illustrates a real-world example of what I'm talking about. Within this post (you may need to visit my site if you're using a feed reader or aggregator to see the gadget) is a gadget that displays an RSS feed from del.icio.us containing links to all the posts related to this series.

So what, you say. I could have just added the links manually and accomplished the same thing, right? Well, in this case I've done much more than that. With this gadget, I can display an RSS feed on any web page anywhere -- and it's live. It will update whenever the feed is updated. So when I change my del.icio.us bookmarks to include more links, they'll show up here too!

This method could be used to display a blogroll, links to other blogs you develop, your favorite links, or any other feed you can think of. I decided to use del.icio.us because they already provide a way for me to keep track of my favorite stuff and they have an RSS feed creator built in. All I do is add a link to my account, set the proper tags and then it just works. You can see my blogseries links here. Additionally, if you like this series, you can click on the "Add This to My Site" link to get the code to put this series on your site. Note: it's not available today, but I'll finish it up as part of this series.

So, if you have been following this series along, you'll see that this gadget accomplishes everything I've been talking about. First, it's a gadget that provides some useful functionality that is valuable to you and your site visitors. Second, it is a gadget that invites itself to be shared. If you have a feed to share with the world, you can use this gadget to display it on your site and it will invite others to place your feed on their site. Third, this gadget is configurable. It uses CSS stylesheets so you can change the look of it and it allows for other customizations such as title display and number of items to show.

In a few days, you'll be able to use EZFeed (that's what I'm calling this gadget) on your site, but more importantly I hope you're seeing what you can do to use the viral nature of the web to advertise for you and help you spread the word about your site or blog. There's a lot more out there than simply search engines and paid advertising.