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.

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.

Random Excerpts Fader vs blogsiread