One of the quickest and easiest ways to give your sidebar a little more fresh content is to add an RSS feed from another blog or news source. If you really like reading another colleague’s blog, you can pull in his or her five most recent entries. For example, on Bob Ingle’s “Politics Patrol” blog, the most recent posts from our sister blog in Trenton, “Capitol Quickies,” automatically come into the sidebar, like so:

In a totally different kind of treatment, on Kevin Callahan’s “Into the Outside” blog, he pulls in an RSS feed of the latest outdoor gear that’s been posted to CraigsList:

As long as you can find an RSS feed for the content you’re interested in calling in, WordPress will do all the rest. It’s up to you whether or not to pull in just headlines, or headlines and content, or headlines and content and author name and date posted. All that is fully customizable.

Once you’ve found an RSS feed (usually by either click on the orange RSS icon or the RSS icon in your browser bar), copy the URL location of that feed.

Next, go into the blog backend.

Choose DESIGN –> WIDGETS

Find the RSS widget on the left-hand column. Click “Add”

That widget will get added to the list of live widgets on the right. Click on “Edit.”

Paste the feed address in the first box, the name of the feed in the second, and then check off any additional settings you’d like. Click “Change” at the bottom of the widget, and then “Save Changes” at the bottom of the widget sidebar list.

The RSS feed should now start coming into your sidebar dynamically.

Here’s a video to recap the steps: