The RSS Web Part supports connections so you can create a connection between a list of RSS Links and the RSS Viewer Web Part.

You would think that the RSS Web Part would understand if it was being sent the Feed URL value from a list column formatted as a URL field (url, title) but it doesn't. If you create such a connection you will get the following error.

ProtocolError occured trying to complete the request. The server returned a status code of : BadRequest and the status description is : "Bad Request"

To solve this problem you can either:

• Use a single line text field to store the RSS url
• Modify the value passed in the connection to remove the url field title value

The following steps show you how to configure option 2.

After creating the web part page with the list and RSS Viewer web parts placed on the page (you can use the SharePoint Web UI or SPD to do this), you need to edit the page using SharePoint Designer, convert the List web part to a Data View, recreate the connection and look for the field that you selected to create the Hyperlink on (in my case this was the Author field) in the Data View code.

In code view, search for "ddwrt:GenFireConnection" and change the value of @RSS= in this line...

<xsl:variable xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" name="fields">@RSS=

To...

<xsl:value-of select="ddwrt:ConnEncode(substring-before(@Your_URL_Field_Name, ','))" />

Here is an example web part page with the connection http://www.wssdemo.com/pages/blogrssview.aspx

I have created a custom Content Type list item view for SharePoint Blogs in my resource list. http://www.wssdemo.com/Pages/blogs.aspx

When you select one of the blogs, you will be redirected to a page that shows the blog details in a Data View Web Part which is connected to the RSS View web part.
e.g. http://www.wssdemo.com/Lists/Resources/Blog/ViewBlog.aspx?ID=675