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.

Jack Reichert

This plugin was developed to display excerpts from random posts in a category. jQuery is used for fading the plugin in and out. It’s a great way for displaying testimonials of clients or just giving a snapshot of content from your site.
Shortcode added as of version 1.4
The most basic use is: <code>[reFader]</code> this will use the default options. 
Here is an example of all the options in use 
 [reFader title=”Random Excerpts” cat=”23″ type=”post” amount=”5″ length=”50″ duration=”5000″ linked=”no” url=”http://www.jackreichert.com/”]
This will show 5 (amount) posts (type) from category #23 (cat). It will show 50 (length) words from each post and fade out/in every 5 seconds (duration). It will not link each title to the corresponding post, but it will link all the titles to this plugins page (url).

Random Excerpts Fader

Creates a widget that takes randomly a number of excerpts from a category of your choice and fades them in and out.

Post and Page Excerpt Widgets vs Random Excerpts Fader