Many of you reading this are using a feed reader, where you aggregate many blog feeds and read them together. As a blog writer, I want to make my feed available to anyone who wants to read it. However, many people don’t realize that you can utilize your own blog feed for yourself, and not just to read your own posts.

Making your blog feed available on Web sites is way to draw new readers to your blog. You may have seen widgets that you can place on a Web site to share with readers your latest blog feeds. Where widgets work well in many cases, with some extra effort, namely some server-side Web scripting, you can use you part or all of your feed and control its presentation.

One of my clients is River Junction Press, the publisher of the book Lewis and Clark Road Trips, a great book on heritage travel along the trail Lewis and Clark took over 200 years ago. When we developed the Web site the author, Kira Gale, wanted to make her blog posts available on the Web site. On the home page of the Web site, we display the first paragraph of the 3 most recent blog posts. The blog itself is an option in the tab navigation at the top, and Web site visitors will get a taste of the blog, and links to it, right on the home page.

This was achieved using ColdFusion scripting, the language the Web site was developed in, plus the same style sheet for the Web site. This can be done with any other language that allows you to process an XML file. Looking at the Web site home page, does it look like there’s blog content there, other than the heading? That is the beauty of RSS!

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