blogsiread

blogsiread is a highly customisable widget inspired by Blogger’s «Blogs I Read» function that takes excerpts from other blogs (via Links) and displays them in a small widget on your blog.

Features

• Change widget title
• Automatically selects blogs from «Links» based on «Categories»
• Optional – Show Site Title (either from link name or meta tags)
• Optional – Show Post Title
• Optional – Show Post Excerpt (250 characters max, plain text)
• Optional – Order listing by «as ordered in Links page», Post Published Date, Link Name, Site Title, Post Title. All can be additionally sorted in descending or ascending order.
• Clicking on entries can open in a new window or in the same window
• You can customise your widget by adding a css class.

TODO

• More customisable layout
• Limit total entries and more importantly, before loading their xml-s
• Complete or co-operative ajax to reduce server load and more importantly, page loading times
• Make the category selector look pretty
• Allow customisable Post Excerpt character limit
• Do that cool thing where the widget title in the admin page is «blogsiread: «

For those who are using a custom CSS Class, structure of widget content is as follows (some lines may not be displayed at all depending on widget options – see #): <p class=»yourCustomClassName»> # <a rel=»sitetitle»….</a> OR if site url is blank: <span rel=»sitetitle»……</span> # <a rel=»posttitle»….</a> OR if post url is blank: <span rel=»posttitle»……</span> # <span rel=»desc»>…CONTENT…</span> <span rel=»timeago»>…TIME…</span> </p>