I fought the widget, and I won.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

I have been trying and trying to figure out how to make a widget for our Ning group that pulls the rss feeds of all your individual blogs (so you didn't have to, you know, click one more time to find the blogroll here on the class blog). I'm not sure it was really worth all the effort, but you can see what I came up with. It works like a collapsible outline, so click on your various blogs to see the posts below. It's kinda ugly, and pretty cumbersome, but it's the only widget creator I could get to work. I learned all about OPML files (something I'd never come across before) -- it's basically like a live outline or list of blog feeds. I used this site to turn my list of your blog feeds into a hosted OMPL file. Then I inserted the url it created for me into this widget creator. Once we all start posting more, if this thing doesn't work we can just get rid of it. But anyways, go play with the result of my many hours of labor (it really shouldn't have been so hard).