Sproutbuilder is a very interesting online application which provides a visual editor to enable the easy creation of flash-compatible graphic objects. I was able to quickly and easily use sproutbuilder to make a flash gadget that grabs the RSS feed from here on the blog and posts it to the caddyinfo website page at http://www.caddyinfo.com . Very cool and easy to use and helpful.
The resulting SWF file is hosted on the sproutbuilder server, which I guess is great for most usages, but I will have to research to see if there is a simple way to grab it and selfhost the swf file.
No worries; on the publish tab one can access and save off the resulting swf file, then selfhost and edit the object code suggested to point at the selfhosted version.