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>