Workshopshed

<p>The RSS Feed checker looks through your blogroll for links with rss feeds and then stores the name and url of the latest article.<br />
The Links RSS Enhanced widget then displays the latest links in descending order.<br />
The idea for the widget comes from the blogroll widget on blogger.</p>
<h3>Technical section</h3>
<p>The plugin will create an extra table in your wordpress database to store the latest feed updates,<br />
this will be called links_rss with the prefix for your database e.g. wp_links_rss</p>
<p>A Cron (schedule) is created to run every 30 minutes and process links. Note that Cron in WordPress<br />
depends on hits, your WordPress website receives. So playing with this plugin within an offline<br />
environment (MAMP, XAMPP, WAMP etc.) without anyone or anything triggering the scheduling by<br />
sending requests to the WordPress page won’t produce any results if you do not trigger it by<br />
yourself.</p>
<h3>References</h3>
<p>A selection of places I’ve found help for this plugin.</p>
<p>Thanks also to Ozh, Roland Rust and for their explainations and examples</p>
<h4>Admin UI</h4>
<ul>
<li>https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/add_meta_box</li>
<li>https://codex.wordpress.org/Administration_Menus#Page_Hook_Suffix</li>
<li>http://wpengineer.com/1295/meta-links-for-wordpress-plugins/</li>
<li>http://www.code-styling.de/english/how-to-use-wordpress-metaboxes-at-own-plugins</li>
<li>http://planetozh.com/blog/2008/02/wordpress-snippet-add_meta_box/</li>
<li>http://wptheming.com/2011/08/admin-notices-in-wordpress/</li>
<li>http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/improving-security-in-wordpress-plugins-using-nonces</li>
</ul>
<h4>Ajax</h4>
<ul>
<li>http://return-true.com/2010/01/using-ajax-in-your-wordpress-theme-admin/</li>
<li>http://amiworks.co.in/talk/simplified-ajax-for-wordpress-plugin-developers-using-jquery/</li>
<li>http://xplus3.net/2008/10/16/jquery-and-ajax-in-wordpress-plugins-administration-pages/</li>
<li>http://www.garyc40.com/2010/03/5-tips-for-using-ajax-in-wordpress/</li>
</ul>
<h4>Database</h4>
<ul>
<li>http://createmy.com.au/connecting-your-plugin-to-the-wordpress-database/</li>
<li>http://webjawns.com/2009/08/the-wordpress-wpdb-class-explained/</li>
</ul>
<h4>Scheduling</h4>
<ul>
<li>http://wpseek.com/source/wp/latest/nav.html?wp-includes/cron.php.html</li>
<li>Ideas on background processing from the broken link checker</li>
</ul>
<h4>Settings</h4>
<ul>
<li>https://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_API – new way to handle options/settings         </li>
<li>http://ottopress.com/2009/wordpress-settings-api-tutorial/</li>
<li>http://planetozh.com/blog/2009/05/handling-plugins-options-in-wordpress-28-with-register_setting/</li>
<li>http://wpengineer.com/2139/adding-settings-to-an-existing-page-using-the-settings-api/</li>
<li>http://blog.gneu.org/2010/09/intro-to-the-wordpress-settings-api/</li>
<li>http://alisothegeek.com/2011/01/wordpress-settings-api-tutorial-1/</li>
</ul>
<h4>RSS Feeds</h4>
<ul>
<li>http://jaewon.mine.nu/jaewon/2010/10/30/how-to-make-your-wordpress-a-rss-reader/</li>
<li>https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Filter_Reference/wp_feed_cache_transient_lifetime</li>
<li>http://simplepie.org/</li>
</ul>


RSS Feed Checker

The RSS Feed checker looks through your blogroll for links with rss feeds and then stores the name and url of the latest article.

dyersorg

<p><a href="http://www.dyers.org/blog/better-blogroll-widget-for-wordpress/#changelog" title="Better Blogroll Change log" rel="nofollow ugc">Changelog</a></p>
<p>The Better Blogroll widget for WordPress allows you to display a configurable number of random links from your WordPress blogroll. This should help to combat link blindness while still letting you to share the link love with more of your favorite blogs.</p>
<p>Some Features:</p>
<ul>
<li>Links can be sorted randomly, by title, or by rating.</li>
<li>The number of links shown is configurable.</li>
<li>Categories from which links are shown is configurable.</li>
<li>Links can be set to “nofollow” if your links are coming from paid sources.</li>
<li>Capable of Displaying XFN Data.</li>
<li>Displays image links, text links, or both.</li>
<li>Links can be in a single list or separated by category.</li>
<li>Can display each link’s category or rating to its right.</li>
<li>The description of each link appears in a tool tip.</li>
<li>Allows you to show an explanation that the list is a rolling blogroll.</li>
</ul>


Better Blogroll

Allows you to display a configurable number of random links from your Wordpress blogroll

RSS Feed Checker vs Better Blogroll