How To display Pinterest Latest Pins In A Slideshow

Pinterest latest pins slideshow is another way of displaying latest pins from any Pinterest user or board on a Blogger blog. In my opinion it is a better alternative to the Pinterest’s Profile or Board widget because it occupies less space. Furthermore each image is directly linked to its pin page on Pinterest, as opposed to profile/board page if you are using Pinterest’s Profile/Board widget.

Visit Blogger Sentral’s widget showcase blog to view/test the demo.

To install this widget, all you need is the RSS feed URL for a user or board, and use that as the input for a Blogger slideshow gadget.

Here are the steps in detail:

I. Constructing Pinterest RSS feed URL

Pinterest feed URL format for a user slightly differs that of an individual board.

• User pins

  For a user, the feed URL will be the user’s profile URL + feed/rss. (To get your profile URL, simply go to Pinterest homepage and click your username on top right corner of the screen. Your profile URL is the URL you see in your web browser’s URL bar.)

  For example, my feed URL would be:

  http://pinterest.com/greenlava/feed/rss

• Individual board pins

  For a board, the feed URL will be the board’s URL + rss. (To get a board URL, click on the board from the homepage. The board URL is the URL you see in your web browser’s URL bar.)

  For example, my “Blog tweaks and tutorials” board feed URL would be:

  http://pinterest.com/greenlava/blog-tweaks-and-tutorials/rss

II. Reformatting the feed for slideshow gadget

The RSS feed we’ve constructed above is a regular RSS feed and is not compatible with Blogger slideshow gadget as the slideshow gadget only accepts a RSS feed in Media RSS format.

Fortunately I’ve managed to come up with a decent RSS to Media RSS converter using Yahoo! Pipe. To convert, simply plug in your feed URL into the Yahoo Pipe URL below:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=856c92426668cf9fecea6aa73adf4c72&_render=rss&feedURL=http://pinterest.com/greenlava/feed/rss&pinCount=10

Replace:

• the value of feedURL with the feed URL you got in step I.
• the value of pinCount with the number of latest pins to be displayed on the slideshow, from 1 to 25.

This new URL is the URL for the Media RSS version of your Pinterest feed.

III. Adding the slideshow widget

1. Go to Dashboard > Layout and click a Add A Gadget.
2. In Add A Gadget window, scroll down and select Slideshow.
   
3. Under Source, select Other.
   
4. Enter the converted Pinterest RSS feed URL from step II into the Feed URL text box.
5. Click Save and view your blog.

Enjoy!