Make Your Own Widget News Reader

You may have noticed that I have cut back on the book reviews and other investing posts. I have been playing around with the blogs layout and such. Will be back on Monday with the start of some book reviews. But today I wanted to talk about another thing you can do with widgets.

Now I am not an expert with computers and code. If I were my name probably would be Candice. But even I can see that newsreaders are fast becoming irrelevant, especially if you blog.

How so?

Well the purpose of a newsreader is to collect your feeds so you can easily scan to see if there are posts you want to read. Well who needs that when you have a blog and some widgets? You can just make a quick blog page and drop your feeds into it. Not only that, you make it easy for people who read your blog to see who and what blogs it is you are reading.

I created this page in a few minutes. As you can see, the format styles can be whatever you want, from straight headlines to the whole post (although I did not do that and would not for the reasons stated in my last post) and from small boxes to the whole page. You can have the last five headlines or the last 100.

I used Howard's as an example but will be adding more blogs from my blog roll that I read everyday.

And if you have a favorite stock that you want to keep up on when bloggers post on it you can use the google finance rss feed to do so as can be seen by the widget which is about Wal-mart. Or if you want to stay on top of the Yahoo latest news you can do that too.

Of course if you use blogger and google reader you can do it pretty easy as shown with the last widget.

About the only thing I did not figure out is how to get two widgets side by side to use up more of the screen space. Maybe if I ask real nice Candice will tell me how to do it. :)