iamgarrett

Google’s Blogger tool has a great blogroll gadget, which I’ve always wanted in WordPress. I tried a few plugins that advertised similar behavior but was never quite satisfied – so I made my own.
This will grab all your links with a category of ‘sidebar’ and show them in a list on your sidebar. Specify each link’s RSS/Atom feed address and it will grab the latest post, a link, and reorder the list based on when these posts were written. It only requires that you have jQuery and PHP and uses the Links and Widget section already included in WordPress.

Good Reads

An ordered blogroll widget for your sidebar that displays your favorite blogs, what they're writing, and when.

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.

Good Reads vs blogsiread