Customized Headline Animator from FeedBurner

I've been playing with a few things lately, trying to create a widget linking to all the hack tutorials here on the site. I'd love to be able to hand other bloggers a bit of sidebar bling they could use to point their readers at useful info on hacking blogs. There's a few things I could do manually, but I know I'd just get behind sooner or later. I need something that updates automatically and can do so through a category feed.

A few weeks ago, Fred Wilson posted about FeedBurner's custom Headline Animator. I've been meaning to play with it and since I've been spending more time reloading site stats at FeedBurner lately, I thought I'd give it a whirl while I was there today. Here's my first attempt. I kinda like it!

 

 

It took me about 7 minutes to put this together, including launching Illustrator and altering the original art to make room for the headlines. Not bad. I made the blog name and the date match the background color in order to get rid of them, since there's currently no option to disable them in the design wizard. Also, I changed the link in the code they provide to point to the site rather than the feed URL… I figure that way, when people click, they can get a good preview of what's here and subscribe if they're interested. It would be way cool if the default setting actually too you to the post whose headline is displayed, but hey. It's free.

If you'd like to put this into your sidebar to send a few people by, that would be awesome… I'm going to keep working on a slightly more useful widget that allows people to select a hack from a constantly updated menu, but for now, this is what I got. The code to insert this into any notes style TypeList is this:

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<a href="http://www.typepadhacks.org"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/TypepadHacks.gif" alt="TypePad Hacks" style="border: 0pt none ;" /></a></div>