Over at WordPress.com, we recently added a new feature to the WordPress.com Reader. You can now build a list of blogs you like, and recommend them to others.

What if your readers could help your blog grow? What if the writers you love could introduce their audience to yours?

That’s the idea behind recommended blogs, a feature now available in the WordPress.com Reader that lets you share the blogs you enjoy most with your own audience.

Let’s Grow Together: Introducing Recommended Blogs 

Since the WordPress.com Reader lets you follow any site that supports RSS, you can recommend blogs on any platform or CMS. As long as the site includes an RSS feed, you’ll be good to go!

You can view my recommended blogs in my WordPress.com Reader profile.

Ever the champion of the Open Web, @davew asked me if one could fetch those recommended blogs to show in their own app or tools. Since this is WordPress.com, recommended blogs are indeed available via the WordPress.com REST API. There are different endpoints one can use to fetch and show recommended blogs. All you need to get started is a WordPress.com username.

Side-note: WordPress.com usernames are also Gravatar usernames, so once you have a Gravatar username, you can show all sorts of information the person chose to make public in their profile:

Check our API documentation to find out more.

Once you have a WordPress.com username, you can make a request to rest/v1.2/read/lists/<username>/recommended-blogs/items to get a list of their recommended blogs:

We also have another endpoint you can use to export the list in OPML format: wpcom/v2/read/lists/<list-ID>/export. You can get that list ID from the API response just above. That can be handy if you then want to import the list in your own Reader!

If you haven’t tried the WordPress.com Reader yet, this could be a good opportunity to give it a try!