How to use the Blog List gadget in Blogger.
Blog List is a gadget for displaying a blogroll — a list of links to blogs that you follow or recommend. This is useful for showing your blog's connection to other blogs and provide more content to explore for your visitors.
Unlike the Link List gadget, you can display the feed content of the linked blogs, if available.
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| Blogger Blog List gadget. |
Here's the gadget configuration dialogue:
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| Blog List gadget settings. |
It takes a blog feed URL and retrieve the first entry from the feed. While it says it's a live view of the blogs, in reality it only displays a cached feed entry. So it takes a while to reflect any updates from the blogs.
Quick tips: You can force it to show the latest feeds content by adding a random parameter at the end of the feed URL, e.g. ?random=1
Add A New Item
Blogger will suggest blogs from your Reading List. If you choose one from the list, it will fill the next input with the URL of the blog. Which is nice, but it won't work, because that's not a blog feed URL.
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| Blog List gadget input dialogue. |
A valid blog feed URL looks like this:
http://xmlexpr.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/defaultHowever, if you enter the blog URL manually and click Save, Blogger will try to detect the feed URL, and if it found one, you'll get the following dialogue:
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| Blog List gadget "Feed URL found" dialogue. |
This is the URL that you want. Keep the default option and press OK, then save the item.
Additional Notes
If you think the feed content displayed by the Blog List gadged is the same as the one displayed by the Feed gadget, no, it's not.
Looking at the network request here, we can see that Blog List gadget's feed renders the post as part of your blog's HTML response. This means they're not dynamically-loaded, so that's one less thing to worry about blog layout shift which is a drawback of the Feed gadget.
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| Blog List gadget HTML response. |