(Note: I initially wrote this as an email to a person asking about how to make a blogroll out of the nonprofit blog exchange del.icio.us tags, see the Non Profit Blog Exchange block on the left hand side. However people have asked me to spread it around, so I'm posting it here as well.)

There are several different ways of making a blogroll of del.icio.us tags depending on the type of blogging software that you use. In my case, I use CivicSpace or Drupal. With these systems, you can subscribe to the RSS feed from del.icio.us and display the results of the subscription in a block on the side of the screen. It is fairly easy with a CivicSpace or Drupal site. If anyone has questions about doing this in CivicSpace, they should contact me.

However, more genericly, you can use a site like FeedDigest to make such a blog roll.

Go to http://www.feeddigest.com/

In the box, type in the RSS feed for the del.icio.us tags that you want.

As an illustration, Emily's nonprofitblogexchange tag can be accessed as
http://del.icio.us/rss/emtx09/nonprofitblogexchange

You might also want to use
http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/nonprofitblogexchange
which will get you all of the sites tagged nonprofitblogexchange whether they've been tagged by Emily or someone else.

Post the RSS feed in the box which says
Specify an RSS or Atom feed that you want to digest or process..

When you hit next you will be given options about how you want the feed to be displayed, the title, the number of entries, the format, etc.

It will then display the code that you should include in your templates. They provide a Javascript version of the code and a PHP version. It is best to use the PHP version if possible. I would recommend people try the PHP version. If it works, great, if not try the Java version.

You can also share the code that gets generated with other people. They have a caveat that they limit the number of times that your list will be displayed on a daily and monthly basis. It is also worth noting that this is provided as a free service if you want to do one to three feeds. If you want to do more than that, you have to sign up for their pay service.

If you want to use the feed that I set up, with the caveats noted above, feel free to include the javacript code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://app.feeddigest.com/digest3/IJCFBCWTR8.js"><noscript><a href="http://app.feeddigest.com/digest3/IJCFBCWTR8.html">Click for "Non Profit Blog Exchange".</a> By <a href="http://www.feeddigest.com/">Feed Digest</a></noscript></script>

or the PHP code:
<?php
include ("http://app.feeddigest.com/digest3/IJCFBCWTR8.html");
?>

into your blog template.

I hope this helps. Feel free to distribute this to anyone else that would be interested.

Aldon