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
- Translating Brain Waves Into Words
- Infinite Mario With Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment
- Dual-Core CPU Opens Door To 1080p On Smartphones
- Mozilla Labs To Promote Open Web Gaming
- The State of Mapping APIs, 5 Years On
- Smallest Manned Electric Plane Flies
- They Finally Found Out We Like Our Computers
- Journalist Tricked Captors Into Twitter Access
- Tech Sector Slow To Hire
- HP Sues Hurd For Joining Oracle
- Stanford’s Authoritative Alternative To Wikipedia
- White House Correspondent Tweets His Heart Attack
- Sony Releases PS3 Firmware Update To Fight Jailbreaks
- Robot Snake Can Climb Trees
- NSA Director Says the US Must Secure the Internet
- Researchers Say Happiness Costs $75k
- NYT Password Security Discussion Overlooks Universal Logins
- The Gaping Holes In the UAE’s Net Firewall
- Separating Hope From Hype In Quantum Computing
- Behind the Scenes and Inside Workings of a CERT
- Pirate Bay Down; Police Raids Across Europe
- Former HP CEO Selected As Oracle Co-President
- Self-Assembling Photovoltaic Tech From MIT
- Breathing New Life Into Old DirectDraw Games
- Australia To Fight iPod Use By Pedestrians
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.
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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
Hi!
I would like extend my SQL knowledge.
I red really many SQL resources and would like to
get more about SQL for my occupation as mysql database manager.
What can you recommend?
Thanks,
Werutz