Using the RSS widget

RSS widgets are powerful and versatile. They allow you to automatically show content headlines from other blogs and web sites in your sidebar.

In your dashboard, under Design ->Widgets:

Add an RSS widget into your sidebar, edit its settings, and paste in the feed address of any site that you would like to display in your sidebar. If you do this and nothing appears, open the widget settings back up and see if it says there was a problem. Usually it was not a proper feed address that was put in.

You can have multiple RSS widgets by adjusting the number of “RSS Feed Widgets” at the bottom of your  Design ->Widgets page.

You cannot put your the feed address from your own blog into one of your RSS widgets. If you’d like to show your own recent headlines in you sidebar, please use the Recent Posts widget instead.

Some examples of feeds you could use in your RSS widgets:

Drop in the feed address from any blog and your RSS widget will show the most recent headlines from that blog:
http://wordpress.com/feed/ (the WordPress.com news feed)
http://lorelle.wordpress.com/feed/ (Lorelle’s blog)
http://38pitches.com/feed/ (Curt Schilling’s blog)
etc

New York Times Op-Ed headlines feed:
http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Opinion.xml
Check here for more NYT feeds.

A feed of the most popular Sci-fi products on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/rss/tag/sci-fi/popular/
Amazon has lots of RSS feeds, including ones you can use to put your Amazon wishlist in your sidebar.

Your Last.FM recently played tracks:
Check this page for info on Last.FM feeds.

Your Netflix queue:
Look for the RSS feed on your Netflix queue page. Here are some more Netflix feeds you could use in your RSS widget.

Those are just a handful of examples. There are hundreds of thousands of other RSS feeds on the web you can use.