Display Your Recent Posts via BuzzBoost

I wanted to add a recent posts widget to my sidebar, but the majority of the methods I found while searching the Web were not really floating my dingy. What I ended up doing was utilizing a simple (and extremely easy) method offered by Feedburner.

If you don't already have a Feedburner account then I recommend you get one. It's very easy to do. Just go to Feedburner, burn the feed from your blog, and you're good to go. This page here will describe the process including how to implement your new feed on Blogger. For a more in-depth explanation of Feedburner's many settings check out this excellent article here.

Once you have your feed activated just log into your Feedburner account and go to Publicize > BuzzBoost.



If you don't have BuzzBoost enabled then turn it on by clicking the Activate button. Once you've activated this feature then you can customize how it appears on your page. I just wanted the code so I left all my options unchecked.



BuzzBoost's job is to redisplay your feed content anywhere you can copy and paste a short snippet of HTML code. The actual BuzzBoost code is just a short line of JavaScript that displays content items and information from a FeedBurner feed according to settings you provide.

You get to control how BuzzBoost displays:

• Feed Title
• Item publication date
• Individual item headlines, headlines and plain text, or headlines and original HTML
• Plain text item excerpt length
• Your original site's favicon, if it has one
• Link to download podcast or videoblog enclosures (if available)

Once you've selected what options you want then click 'Save'. After that return to BuzzBoost and copy the code out of the box.



Now that you have your code just go to Layout > Page Elements (on Blogger) and in your sidebar section click 'Add a Gadget'. Choose 'HTML/JavaScript' and paste your BuzzBoost code into the Content box. If you didn't check the option for 'Display feed title' then you can name this widget. When your're done just click 'Save' and then view your blog. You should now have a feed to your recent posts in your sidebar, which will update every time you write a new one.

I wasn't satisfied just having Feeburner's bland little code box sitting in my sidebar so of course I had to spruce it up. You can see how I did it in my article Box Up Your BuzzBoost.

Thanks for reading and I look forward to your comments.