Feeling sensitive and creative, I decided to try my hand at writing a plug-in for WordPress. I wrote a small, simple plug-in to parse Slashdot’s RSS feed and return the top headlines. You can specify the number of headlines to return and whether or not to return the headline description with each headline. The headlines are returned as links, so you can click into them to link to Slashdot’s full stories. It’s a nice plug-in to throw into your sidebar (or wherever) — after all, news for nerds is stuff that matters! Here’s a sample of plug-in in action:
Slashdot.org Headlines
- Researchers Use Google’s Search Algorithms To Fight Cancer
- UK Government Staff Caught Snooping On Citizen Data
- Social Networking: The New Workplace Smoke Break
- Ask Slashdot: Wrist Watch For the Tech Minded
- Android Hackers Honing Skills In Russia
- US Justice Dept Defends Right To Record Police
- Dolby’s TrueHD 96K Upsampling To Improve Sound On Blu-Rays
- Paralyzed Woman Uses Mind-Controlled Robot Arm
- Vermont Bans Fracking
- Tenenbaum To SCOTUS: Let’s Get This Debate Rolling
- Comcast To Remove Data Cap, Implement Tiered Pricing
- From MIT Inventor To Tea Party Leader
- Paul Vixie: 100,000 DSL Modems May Lose Their DNS On July 9
- Iran Threatens Legal Action Against Google For Not Labeling Gulf ‘Persian’
- The Pirate Bay Returns, Anonymous Hater Takes Credit For DDoS
You can download the thing here. My PHP skillz are what you would call – slim to none! So, if the code is messy and not very logical, don’t blame me. I’m working on it. At least the thing works. Hope some of you find the plug-in useful.
{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }
Very nice plugin. Works fine. Thank you.
Thanks, Orlando. Glad it worked out for ya.
Thanks man. ive been looking for something like this. I was just going to include external scripts but if there is a plugin made already… why not. thanks for your generousity
Thanks, this saves me a lot of work. I’m just setting up a blog for my girlfriend, who is a trainee teacher. I’ve amended your module so that I can display the BBc education News headlines on her site. Brilliant!
I installed it and activated it and am stuck.. can’t get anythin… help!
Works great. Now I can let others see the headlines I’m currently checking out.
My website is in dutch and I would like to use this (if I can find a dutch website that has some support for this). But…Is it easy to change the content it displays?
My WordPress & PHP skills are evolving, but….
good one plugin !
p.s. there flags of commenters are bug, and display for all a flag of the man who now see it page (from it’s IP, location) – check it
Lynx, thanks for the finding the bug with the flags. I never gave them much attention, but it did seem strange that everyone seemed to be coming from the United States!
np
it’s good now 
!
I’ve figured out a way to tweak the file to display other feeds. How can I get two instances of this plugin running on one site? I want to display the RSS from two sites. Thanks in advance.
Thanks man, it works great. I have it running on my site (vdsl2.se). Nice one.
@tom
It might work (haven’t tried this myself) if you make a copy of the one you got (SlashdotHeadlines.php) and change the name (of the php file) to something apropriate. Then open it and change:
on line 4
“Plugin Name: Slashdot.org Headlines” to e.g. “Plugin Name: Google Headlines”
on line 24
“function SlashdotHeadlines” to e.g. “function GoogleHeadlines”
And of course change the feed url.
Then upload and install/activate it.
and to call that new scripts function on your site use… instead of “SlashdotHeadlines(5)” use “GoogleHeadlines(5)”.
Cheers,
Mike
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