Using del.icio.us as a Sophisticated "Google Reader"

I've been using del.icio.us for quite a long time to keep track of links I'm interested in. What I discovered recently is that you can use it to share links relating to favorite topics in the sidebar of your blog.

If you look in the sidebar of Studeo, you can see three sections of links near the top "Prayer Requests", "Interesting Stuff" and "My Posts Elsewhere" (or something along those lines). My sister has used it even more extensively here.

The way you do it is this:

First, you need to set up an account at del.icio.us and start tagging favorite posts, websites and articles (somewhere on the site is an option to add a del.icio.us button to your browser - makes it REALLY easy).

To set up a "link roll", on the del.icio.us page go to "settings" and then "link rolls" and build your own widget. There you can select a title, pick which tags you want included, how many links you want to show at a time, whether you want "bullets" to delineate each item, etc. Once you like the look, just cut and paste the code into your sidebar.

One of the nice things is that the title of the link roll will link directly to your entire list of articles containing the same tag.

Just in case that's not clear, I'll walk you through an example from my site:

I've been tagging my posts on other blogs "myposts" so that I can easily access them on Studeo. When I went into the "link roll" segment of del.icio.us (under "settings"), I titled my widget: "What I'm Blogging About Elsewhere" and chose to only include articles I had tagged with "myposts".

Cut and paste the code into an HTML page element on Blogger (I imagine it works similarly on Typepad, Wordpress, etc.) Voila.