I was looking to add some RSS feeds to my sidebars for popular news sites that I view daily, or close to daily. I looked at using the RSS widget that is included in Wordpress but it is very limited and I wanted something more customizable, which I found on KB Advanced RSS Widget.

Adam R. Brown is the author of this widget and I am pleased with what he has done. He has added features to allow you to list certain portions of the RSS feed coming in. Some of the other features include:

• Decide which RSS fields to display (as opposed to the default RSS widget, which limits you to link and title), and
• Decide how to format the fields (it doesn’t have to be a list if you don’t want it to be).

You are also able to add titles to each feed so that it is clear to your readers what they are looking at. With some work you can limit the title to a certain number of character or parse the first X amount of characters off the beginning. This is handy if your feed has a static lead in that you want to remove.

He also mentions that this is called an advanced product for a reason:

Be aware that it’s called “advanced” for a reason. You need to know some basic HTML, and possibly a little PHP, to use this fully.

I am sure most people who know how to install an widget on their own hosted Wordpress will be able to get this in there and working.

As you can see for now I have added feeds from Leo Laporte and Chris Pirillo because they are a couple of my favorites. I think that I will eventually move towards putting a news service, or a more current events type blog on there. That seems to make more sense to me for my blog.

If you are looking to add RSS feeds to your site go take a look!