I love go out to look and see what items on Dabbled people are pinning on Pinterest.  I had no idea some of my old posts had gotten rediscovered via Pinterest till I noticed some of them had a bunch of pins.  If you have a website, and you want to know what items on your site are getting pinned, you just need to go to http://pinterest.com/source/yourblogname.com/ (in my case http://pinterest.com/source/dabbled.org/) .

So I was thinking, wouldn’t it be cool to have a sidebar widget or something where I could highlight Dabbled posts that are popular right now on Pinterest?  Now, it’s pretty easy to add a widget to show your own posts (as we discussed, those have an RSS feed, and there are many plugins around to make that super simple).  But there is no feed (as far as I can tell) for the /source/ page.  So we have a two step process:  First, we need to build a feed, and second, we need to display in our sidebar. And, if you’ll look to your right, you’ll see it in the sidebar, under the “Past Projects” list.

Building an RSS Feed from your blog “source” page on Pinterest

I got a ton of help on this from two posts:  How to Add a Pinterest Pin Board to Your WordPress Blog by JesseLuna and How to Track Your Website’s Content on Pinterest at Mashable.   Neither was doing exactly what I wanted to do, but together, they helped a bunch. The JesseLuna post has a good step by step, so I’m not going to recreate the whole thing here.  Basically you go to Feed43 to create a custom feed. When you get to Step 2: Define extraction rules, you can leave Global blank, then enter the following code in the Item Search Pattern field:

<a href="http://pinterest.com/pin/{%}" class="PinImage ImgLink">{*}
<img src="{%}" alt="{%}"{*}
<p class="description">{%}</p>{*}
<a href="{%}" title="{%}" class="ImgLink">{*}

You’re basically just pulling out the information you’ll need with this. When you get to the RSS Item Properties section, do something like this: Item Title Template*: [?]

{%3} Pinned by {%6}

Item Link Template*: [?]

http://pinterest.com/pin/{%1}

Content:

<a href="http://pinterest.com/pin/{%1}"><img src="{%2}" alt="{%3}" /></a><br/>
Shared by <a href="{%5}">{%6}</a><br/>
[<a href="http://pinterest.com/source/dabbled.org/">All Dabbled.org Pins</a>]

Note that the last line of the content is just a hard coded link back to the /source page.  You can leave that out, or change it to your own source page.

If you’ve done everything right (and again, follow the directions on the other blog, just use my info above for pulling from the /source/ page), you’ll have a spiffy homemade feed, suitable for putting in your feedreader (if you’re obsessive about when people pin your posts) or, as we’re going to do, add to a sidebar widget.

Creating a sidebar widget for your new feed

Now, if you don’t care about photos, and just want a list of items, you can use the built in RSS widget in WordPress.  Easy Peasy.  In my case, I wanted to show the photos of the Pinned items, with a link back to the Pin itself, as pinned by the reader.

My solution was the Anyfeed Slideshow plugin for WordPress.  The Super-Simple Pinterest Widget might also work for your needs, the format just wasn’t what I was looking for.  But either will pull in images and titles from your newly created feed.  (Have you tried something else? Leave a comment!)

For AnyFeed Slideshow, I just installed it, and configured it on the Widgets page adding my own title and the feed URL I got from feed43.com.

You can play around with the display options, but the main setting I changed was checking off the following:

• Show Navigation?
• Show Titlebar?
• Permanent Titlebar?

I did notice that I could only have one feed widget on a page.  Trying to add a second one on the same page to show Foodwhirl.com Pins didn’t work.

So, wanna see it?

Well, it’s over on the sidebar now –>

In addition to the slideshow widget, I added a couple of Buttons (see below), and some explanatory text in a second text widget.  If you’ve pinned something on Dabbled recently, you’ll see yourself in the box!  It pulls the last 30 or so Pins, and I’m not sure how quickly it updates.