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Trulia Voices is one of the most popular parts of our site. Our rapidly growing community has done a great job asking and answering real estate questions. Today, we’re excited to announce the release of our RSS feed widget for your Trulia Voices Answers. You’ll now have the ability to broadcast your Voices Answers directly on your website or blog. It’s a great way to expand the conversation.

What does this mean?

1. People who are interested in our answers can subscribe to your feed and get notified every time you answer a question.
2. You can showcase your real estate expertise to your own web audience.

We’ve worked with Widgetbox, a popular widget community, to create this step-by-step guide to creating your own Trulia Voices widget. Creating a widget requires you to first register (for free) with Widgetbox. After completing these steps, which should take less than 10 minutes, your widget will look like this and is customizable to match your site.

Check out Trulia Voices Answers widgets live on Voices members sites:
Joshua Jarvis, Mario Pinedo, Don Tepper

We’d like to thank all members who showed such an enthusiasm about this feature as well as members such as Sylvia Barry whose feedback was crucial to guarantee high quality!

Here are the steps to create your own Voices Widget:

1. On your Voices profile page, you’ll see a small “RSS” link on the left hand side of the page. Click the RSS link and select “View RSS feed”. The RSS feed of your Voices Answers will open in a new internet browser window or tab. For this example, we’ll use Vicky’s profile to create our widget.

2. From your RSS feed, copy the URL of the RSS feed. For instance, Vicky’s RSS feed URL is http://www.trulia.com/voices/my_answers/97455.

3. In a new internet browser window, go to the Widgetbox home page.

4. On the Widgetbox home page, click on the link to “Make a Blidget.” A Blidget is a simple web widget that uses RSS feeds to populate the Blidget’s content. In this case, we’ll use the Voices Answers RSS feed to make a Blidget.

5. On the Make a Blidget page, paste the Voices Answers RSS feed URL you copied in step 2 and click the “Continue” button.

6. Now your Blidget is starting to come together. You’ll see the Blidget customization options on the page and a preview of the Blidget on the right hand side. You can customize the color, size, title, caption, image, description and tags of the Blidget and at the very least you should change the title and image to something more personal to yourself. . You can also select to show questions and answers or just the questions that you have answered. When you’re finished, click on the “Publish Blidget” button on the top or bottom right hand side of the page.

7. Congratulations, you’ve just created a Blidget! Now you can get the Blidget and put it on your web page or blog. Click on the “Get Widget” button on the top right side of the page.

8. From the popup window, you can choose to embed your Blidget in several popular blogging platforms and other web publishing services. Of course, you can always copy the Blidget embed code from the popup and paste it directly into your web page.

9. After embedding your Blidget on your blog or web page, you’re done! Now you can show off your real estate expertise by publishing your Voices Answers your own page. Here’s an example of Vicky’s Voices Answers Blidget on a blog.

We’re excited to give our community the ability to showcase their real estate expertise. We get lots of great ideas and suggestions from you and we’d like to thank Dirk Knudsen for suggesting this idea to us in a feedback email.

As always, please let us know if you have comments or feedback, and happy widget-ing!

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