I saw a blog that had a list of the latest Entrecard users to drop a card on their blog. How can I do this?
This was an interesting question that Camille from Shopaholic asked me. She had been playing with Entrecard for a few days and wanted to make it acknowledge people who dropped their card on her blog. She’s using WordPress for her blog and we’ll be using that as an example of how to accomplish this; however, the idea translates well to any other platform you’re using as long as they can display the contents of an RSS feed. If you’ve never used Entrecard before, here’s the description of what it is, right off their website:
Entrecard is your business card 2.0. It’s a 125×125 image which represents you and your blog. Its part advertisement, part business card. It comes with a widget you place on your blog, so that others can leave their Entrecard for you. You can also use Entrecard to promote your blog and launch free advertising campaigns.
Anyway, back to the question, how do we list the latest people who dropped their Entrecard on your blog? Well, the tick to doing this is an feed that Entrecard provide of your latest droppers. To get this, log into Entrecard and look for the RSS icon in the top right hand corner:
Right click on the RSS icon and Copy Link Location (or Copy Shortcut if you’re using IE). This copies the location of the RSS field to your clip board.
Once this is done, log into the Administration section of your WordPress blog, go to Design and Widgets and add an RSS widget to your sidebar. Once you have this, click on Edit on the widget to change the settings and paste in the RSS feed URL that you copied in the previous step:
You can change any settings you want to add as much information from the feed as you would like, but I’ve kept it simple and will be just showing the name of the website.
Once this is done, don’t forget to Save Changes and you can return to your blog to see the finished result:
Interesting technique, isn’t it, and not that hard (easier than sorting through the HDMI switches behind my TV anyway). I’ve got it running on my own blog, so pop by and drop a card! I’ll drop you one back 
That’s interesting! Thanks! But as someone who uses a template that is not widget-ready, how would I go about displaying this?
This is great, I had no idea we could do this with Entrecard feed. Thanks
Thanks for this post, I’m going to try to do this. I try to thank my top droppers every two weeks, but I may be able to add this as well.
[...] EntreCard widget for wordpress by a nice chap called Owen from AskOwen.info, you can read about it here - this little beauty will use your entrecards RSS feed to generate and display a list of the most [...]
[...] from Ask Owen gave simple, simple directions for adding an RSS feed widget which shows ‘recent Entrecard [...]
I found directions on how to do this about a week ago - in comparing, yours are much easier to follow!
[...] great instructions can be found at askowen. I promise this is so easy. It took me less than 5 minutes and I tend to be a little challenged in [...]
Thank YOU … so much … it took about 45 seconds to set up! Great!
Oh, by the way. I’ve put together a plugin to easily add a widget to your sidebar showing your latest Entrecard droppers:
http://www.u-g-h.com/index.php/wordpress-plugins/wordpress-plugin-entredroppers/
[...] EntreCard droppers’ — from a wonderful blogger named Owen — you can visit his site here — and it took about 45 seconds to set [...]
[...] I create a Spark asking people to blog about an article I posted on AskOwen entitled: How do I list my Entrecard Droppers? which talks about a mechanism that can be used to promote traffic to and from your website using [...]
Thx for sharing .. this is great info. Really neat!!!
This is great!!! It works on blogger too
I’m going to put this on all my Entrecard blogs. Thanks.
@Flo: I’m afraid it’s pretty much aimed at WordPress users .. unless Blogger has a widget you can use to display an RSS feed in
oh neat!! thanks for this.
Thanks Owen. I am off to check this out.