Live Blogroll will make your blogroll livelier. It will show a number of 'recent posts' for each link in your Blogroll using Ajax.
When the user hovers the mouse above the link, RSS feed from the site is automatically discovered and a number of recent posts is shown dynamically in a box.
Live Blogroll uses internal caching for feed discovery and WordPress caching for RSS feeds to make sure everything is smooth.
The looks of the hover box are fully customizable with CSS, and the position is editable in the options.
Live Blogroll in action
Download
Installation & Usage
1. Upload the whole plugin folder to your /wp-content/plugins/ folder.
2. Go to the Plugins page and activate the plugin.
3. Use the Options page to change your options
Frequently Asked Questions
You can address all plugin questions in the forum.
How does it work?
Live Blogroll uses Ajax to dynamically retrieve lasts posts sites in your Blogroll. The posts are then displayed in a popup hover box.
Live Blogroll will first try to search for RSS feed link supplied in your blogroll data. If not found it will load the target page and try to autodiscover the feed. If found this feed will be filled in to your blogroll entry for later faster access.
Live Blogroll does not show a preview for some of my sites, why is that?
The site may not have the RSS feed listed in it's HTML. Or simply it is unavailable at the moment.
Change log
v0.5
- Security update
v0.4
- Fixed IE7 compability issue
v0.3
- Added configurable window offsets
- Added length of post exceprt option
v0.2:
- Initial release
You can also visit my other WordPress Plugins.
If you are looking for WordPress Services, feel free to contact me.
59 Comments
I'm having this installed! :)
It works fine on IE7 now and works on firefox 3 too!
Thank you for your job!
tapirul, you can modify the position of the popup in the admin panel. Fool around with the X and Y coordinates, they put the box on the screen in relation to the mouse pointer. That was a newly added feature from yesterday. :)
... also, a bit of a delay (maybe customizable?) for the box to disappear when moving the mouse from over the link...It's pretty cool that you can click on the feed inside the box (and opens in a new tab), but sometimes I have to hunt the box a while, because it disappears as soon as I move the mouse...
great plugin!
could you make it that the box shows, at the top, the title of the blog it links to (or the name of the link in blogroll)? Sometimes if I hover just a bit off mark, I actually open a box for the link below or above the one I intend, and it's confusing.
It works fine on IE7 now, but now I have an issue with Firefox.
With Firefox, the links that appeared in the box, and everywhere inside the box, pointed to the root of whatever blogname was hovered. No matter what link inside the box you choose, it goes to the homepage of that link. I noticed that with earlier versions also but didn't mention it, I thought that's the way it was supposed to be. But in IE7, all the links listed in the popup will take you to that particular post, as it should be.
Is there something in Firefox I need to adjust?
Excellent plugin Vladimir, just one issue, with the plugin activated my site is not Valid XHTML.
The errors are:
Line 532, Column 30: document type does not allow element "span" here; assuming missing "li" start-tag.
BlogrollBlogroll
Line 544, Column 7: document type does not allow element "li" here; missing one of "ul", "ol", "menu", "dir" start-tag.
Meta
Line 552, Column 9: end tag for "li" omitted, but OMITTAG NO was specified.
Line 532, Column 7: start tag was here.
Blogroll</
Hope you can fix them soon!
Thanks for the plugin
Excellent Vladimir - the new version works perfectly in IE7 - well done!
I have release version 0.4 that fixes the IE7 issue. let me know if that works for you and if you have any more suggestions for making the plugin more usable.
Great Plugin!
I translated this plugin into chinese tonight.
And Published on this website:
http://plugins.wopus.org/wordpress-plugin-live-blogroll.html
can you link chinese vision under your download place?
Best Regards!
I've uploaded the plugin and activated it, but I don't see the RSS when I hover over my blogroll. Are there any additional steps to the installation/configuration that I am missing?
Thanks.
I must admit this live blogroll is cool idea mate. Talk to you later mate.
Hey stari moram ti reci da je dobra ideja ti sa ovim live blogroll.
Hi Vladimir
I have just installed this plugin as I think it is a great idea, but it doesn't work on my site in IE7 on XPpro.
Is this just a firefox addin or is there something that can be done to make it work in IE7.
Here's hoping!
I can just add that it does not work with ie7 (for me) but great with firefox 3
Excellent job, great plugin, now we can customize X and Y !
Thanks
Yes. Perfect. Thank you very much.
Thanks to your talent and the effortless and automatic upgrade procedure built in to wp2.5+, I couldn't be more happier.
It seems to me like the end user now has full control now over the popup, in its appearance, its size, and its position.
I released a new version today that allows you to customize X and Y coordinates relative to mouse pointer where you want the window to open. So I hope this will help :)
Vladimir. I changed the width in the css file to 250px, down from the default 300px and everything looks good.
But there is one more behavior that I need to adjust and here's why.
The popup box appears a fixed number of characters to the right of the mouse pointer. So when I mouseover the name on the blogroll at the first character, everything is fine. But if I mouseover at or near the end of the blogname, if the name is long enough, then the right portion of the box will be beyond the screenwidth, like it was before I reduced it to 250px.
Can I make that distance shorter, say 1 character, instead of the 8 or so that it looks like?
Ted, I'm using Firefox 3 also. I tried it with IE7 and I get 'error on page' in the status line where, with Firefox, the destination url appears.
Not sure where the IE7 issue comes in but my first inclination is that it's the crappy browser and not the plugin. Might be a configuration issue with the ie7 options or something but I don't use it anymore and don't want to waste any time on it to find out. Not that I'd know how to configure it anyway.
Thanks for this good plugin. I implemented it on my blog. But I think there is a problem; it shows post right side of browser (firefox 3). How can I fix?
You can edit the box css file to make it narrower.
For now the box can't guess where is your blogroll located but Ill try and get that for future versions.
I'm trying it now and it works but:
The popup comes up on the right of my right sidebar and the right-hand end of the popup box is off the screen. (and falling all over my desk)
If the box were narrower, OR, if it opened up on the left side of the blogroll w/o having to make the box narrower, that would fix it.
Sometimes the popup box appears to the right of the link name, and when you mouse over to it, it disappears before the mouse can get into the box.
http://rosscalloway.com/lunchcounter/
I haven't tried switching themes yet, but that's the way it's performing with the theme I'm using, rockingsuckerfish. using wp2.5.1
Is there in any way to only shows the blogroll links that has updated?
It works on any theme :)
It only works on wordpress default theme?