Steve Grunwell

<a href="https://codex.wordpress.org/Excerpt" rel="nofollow ugc">WordPress post excerpts</a> can be a great way to hand-craft the summary of your content. Unfortunately, writing post excerpts isn’t as nice of an experience as what you find elsewhere in WordPress. Want to include links in your excerpts, or bold some text? Hopefully you know some HTML!
Advanced Post Excerpts is designed to change that, by giving your editors an easy, intuitive interface for writing great post excerpts.
For complete details and/or to contribute to ongoing development, please <a href="https://github.com/stevegrunwell/advanced-post-excerpt" rel="nofollow ugc">visit this project on GitHub</a>.

Advanced Post Excerpt

Replace the default Post Excerpt meta box with a superior editing experience.

fusionstream

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.
<h4>Features</h4>
<ul>
<li>Change widget title</li>
<li>Automatically selects blogs from “Links” based on “Categories”</li>
<li>Optional – Show Site Title (either from link name or meta tags)</li>
<li>Optional – Show Post Title</li>
<li>Optional – Show Post Excerpt (250 characters max, plain text)</li>
<li>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.</li>
<li>Clicking on entries can open in a new window or in the same window</li>
<li>You can customise your widget by adding a css class.</li>
</ul>
<h4>TODO</h4>
<ul>
<li>More customisable layout</li>
<li>Limit total entries and more importantly, before loading their xml-s</li>
<li>Complete or co-operative ajax to reduce server load and more importantly, page loading times</li>
<li>Make the category selector look pretty</li>
<li>Allow customisable Post Excerpt character limit</li>
<li>Do that cool thing where the widget title in the admin page is “blogsiread: “</li>
</ul>
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 #): 
 
 # <a rel=”sitetitle”….</a> OR if site url is blank: 
 # <a rel=”posttitle”….</a> OR if post url is blank: 
 # …CONTENT… 
 …TIME…

blogsiread

Displays user-definable content from other blogs (via wordpress Links [RSS]) as a widget in your blog in a highly customisable format.

Advanced Post Excerpt vs blogsiread