One thing that makes the WPNI Blogroll unique is our desire to drive traffic to our members. Up until now, the main tool for doing this has been a promotion spot on the homepage of washingtonpost.com. If you have not noticed, the homepage was recently redesigned and this box moved from the right over to the left.

I am really excited about a new tool for driving traffic to our members; an RSS widget that can be placed in the sidebar of members blogs. The widgets come divided out by category, so a travel blog can install a widget that only promotes the other travel blog members and so on.

Here are links to each category's widget configurator.

In the configurator, you are first presented with 3 choices.

The first one is a widget that scrolls the post titles through the widget and comes in four standard colors. Here is an example.

The second option functions the same way the first one does, but gives you complete control over the background color, text color and fonts. Plus, you can even add a background image if you would like.

The third option is a more subtle animation that rotates both the title and the first bits of content (including photos) into the widget. Here is an example:

I encourage all members to display the appropriate widget on their sites. If you install it now you will be encouraging others to do the same. If you wait around for others to go first, then this will never get off the ground.

Leave a comment if you have any questions or concerns.