Stephanie Leary

Creates widgets that display excerpts from posts or pages in the sidebar. You may use ‘more’ links and/or link the widget title to the post or page. Requires <a href="http://blog.ftwr.co.uk/wordpress/page-excerpt/" rel="nofollow ugc">Page Excerpt</a> or <a href="http://www.laptoptips.ca/projects/wordpress-excerpt-editor/" rel="nofollow ugc">Excerpt Editor</a> for page excerpts. Supports <a href="http://robsnotebook.com/the-excerpt-reloaded/" rel="nofollow ugc">the_excerpt Reloaded</a> and <a href="http://sparepencil.com/code/advanced-excerpt/" rel="nofollow ugc">Advanced Excerpt</a>.
Now on <a href="https://github.com/sillybean/Post-and-Page-Excerpt-Widgets" rel="nofollow ugc">GitHub</a>.

Post and Page Excerpt Widgets

Creates widgets that display excerpts from posts or pages in the sidebar.

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.

Post and Page Excerpt Widgets vs blogsiread