Wetpaint is a terrific place to publish your own rich, online community. It’s an incredibly easy to use, collaborative wiki service that also has some of the features of blogs, forums and social networks. You can either create your own site or explore the thousands of sites created by others in the Wetpaint community.

Recently folks have asked how to publish a blist widget on a wetpaint page. Here’s how.

First, think about permissions. You are in full control of who accesses your blist, whether it’s potentially viewed on the blist site proper or running as a widget in another host site like Wetpaint. So you probably want to set the permissions on the blist to match those of the host Wetpaint site. If that site is public, make the blist public. If you shared it with a few people by name or email address, do the same in blist. You can adjust permissions on the task pane, to the right of the desired blist.

After you have the permissions on your blist set correctly, click on the [Publish] icon in the ribbon menu:

When you click on the [Publish] icon the publishing dialog will pop up. From the size combo box, choose the size of widget you want. We don’t have a shortcut code for publishing a widget into Wetpaint, so you’ll need to copy and paste the embed code manually.

Put your cursor anywhere inside the embed code multi-line field and then select all of the text. The easiest way to do that is by pressing <ctrl><a> on Windows or <cmd><a> on a Mac. Once all of the embed code is highlighted, press <ctrl><c> or <cmd><c> to copy it to your clipboard. You won’t notice any visual change, but the embed code will be on your clipboard.

Now go into Wetpaint and bring up the page you want to host the widget. Click on the [EasyEdit] button:

The EasyEdit menu will pop up. Out at the far right end of the menu is a button that says [Widget (videos, rss)]. Click that button to bring up the Add Widget window, which looks like this:

There’s no tile for blist (you should contact Wetpaint and demand it) so you’ll have to scroll down and select Other Widget from the bottom row:

We’re almost done. Hang in there. The Add Widget window will change appearance, allowing you to paste in the embed code you copied out of blist:

Position your cursor in the text box labeled “Enter the code for your widget” and then press <ctrl><v> (on Windows) or <cmd><v> (on the Mac). Finally click on the [Add Widget] button at the bottom of the dialog and you’re done!

Here’s Wetpaint’s help guide in case you need help with embedding the blist widget on Wetpaint.

After you save the changes to your Wetpaint page, you’ll see the blist widget come in. Here’s how mine looks. Pretty sweet.

I’ll close with two final thoughts. First, blist widgets are dynamic. If you update the data in blist, people who see the widget in Wetpaint will see the changes automatically. Second, you can publish a lens instead of the blist if you want. Remember a lens is a filtered view of your data. In fact, the 49ers schedule above is a lens against the entire NFL schedule. The lens has only 49ers games, sorted in chronological order.

Give blist widgets a try. They’re a great way to publish and distribute your data.