pantsonhead

I don’t really like Blogrolls, I think they’re often not much more than glorified link dumps. I don’t like how they give you nothing more than the Blog title, and unless that title really grabs your attention, you’re never gonna click it. I don’t like how they are often just a static list, commonly out of date, that you learn to ignore after the first 4 page views. In their current format, they just appear to be a great waste of space.
This is why I decided to create the RSS Blogroll plugin. RSS Blogroll allows you to link to your favourite blogs via the latest items from their RSS/Atom feed. Article titles are much more attention grabbing and will deliver much higher quality traffic. We all hate clicking through to abandoned blogs – displaying article publication dates also lets readers know these are up to date and active sites.
Many of us want to direct some of our traffic to related sites. RSS Blogroll will create deeplinks to the target sites, which are much more useful for SEO than homepage links. Overall it’s a win-win situation with a better browsing experience for users and the linked sites getting more visitors who are actually interested in their content.

RSS Blogroll

Sidebar widget that links to recent entries from RSS/Atom feeds.

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.

RSS Blogroll vs Good Reads