A Widget For Your Blog

It's now super-simple to add a FeedJournal widget to your web site or blog. You can see it in action in the left-hand column of my blog (http://jonasmartinsson.blogspot.com if you're not already here). Since you are probably using one of the more common blog platforms or social networks (listed below), you're only a few clicks away from having the widget installed to your site.

Developing this widget is something I've intended to do for a long time. It makes integrating FeedJournal with your site so much more easy. Thanks to the November 2007 article on widgets in "Inc. Magazine" I realized that widget development platforms has now reached a level where it is a very trivial task. All-in-all it only took me one hour until the widget was ready for prime time. All thanks to WidgetBox.

So, what does the widget do? First and foremost it contains a thumbnail snapshot of the FeedJournal newspaper and a text link, both linking directly to the newspaper version of your blog. Second, it allows every visitor to your blog or web site to simply share this PDF with the rest of the world, by e-mail or blog post for example.

How do you install it? In 3 simple steps:
1. Visit http://www.feedjournal.com/webservice.html, fill in your blog's feed URL and click submit.
2. Wait for the e-mail with the URL from where you can download the generated newspaper.
3. Click on "Get Widget" to add the widget to your site and configure it with the PDF URL from the e-mail.
When you are ready to update the PDF with the latest feed content, you just have to repeat step #1, since the URL to the PDF stays the same.

Future developments of the widget will include an authentic thumbnail of your PDF file's first page, and the possibility to further customize the look and feel of the widget. If you have any other requirements, I promise to take them into consideration.

Installing the widget to your site is trivial if you're somewhat familiar with HTML. You will only need to paste a HTML tag into your site's source code. To install it on one of the services below is even simpler, doesn't require any HTML knowledge and doesn't take more than a few clicks:

• Blogger
• Typepad
• Pageflakes
• netvibes
• iGoogle
• Piczo