Spicy Blogroll will bring life to an otherwise static Blogroll. It shows a number of post excerpts for each link in your Blogroll using Ajax – a combination of javascript, php and html all rolled into a convenient package they call Ajax. See it in action for yourself – hover your mouse over my blogroll entries on the right.
Spicy Blogroll is a community-minded WordPress plugin which spices up your blogroll, hence the name. It adds interactivity to an otherwise plain blogroll, by showing one or more recent posts (you choose how many) from the listed blogs in a pop-up when a visitor hovers on your blogroll entries.
Why is this “community-minded”? It will potentially attract more visitors to click through to the blogs you are promoting in your sidebar – isn’t that why you promote them?
How can you benefit from installing this plugin? Encourage each of those blogs in your blogroll to add you to their blogroll and install Spicy Blogroll. You will see an increase in the number of people clicking through to you from their blogroll.
See down below for a more detailed description.
Update – Jan 2011 – I am looking for a way to make the spiciness of the blogroll more apparent. At the moment it relies on people hovering over the blogroll. I am considering perhaps a small graphic that sits in your blogroll but that is likely to clash with some themes. If you have an idea for this please let me know. I will add you to my blogroll if you come up with the best idea.
Download
Installation & Usage
- Upload the whole plugin folder to your /wp-content/plugins/ folder.
- Go to the Plugins page and activate the plugin.
- Use the Options page to modify the number of recent posts to show in popup (max 5).
- There is nothing else to do other than populate your blogroll with some great blogs such as MichaelPedzotti.com
Changelog
v1.0=>Jan 20, 2011
* Added a unique class to the native blogroll widget so that the plugin works with practically every theme on the planet.
v0.11=>Oct 21, 2010
* Changed a global variable to avoid clashing with one or more other plugins.
v0.1 => Sep 25, 2010
* Initial release (developed from a plugin published in a tutorial by Vladimir Prelovac)
Detailed Description
When your visitor hovers over a Blogroll link the RSS feed from the site is discovered and a number of recent posts is shown dynamically in a popup box. Each post excerpt includes the post date, a clickable title and the excerpt. You choose the length of the excerpt and whether or not the click opens the post in the same or a new window/tab.
Spicy BlogRoll makes use of internal caching for feed discovery and WordPress caching for RSS feeds to make sure everything is smooth for your visitor.
Practically everything can be customized in the options panel including pop-up width and height, number of posts to show, excerpt length, RSS timeout delay, opacity, link click option (open link in new or parent window) and all the text and error messages. The overall style mimics the existing theme of your blog.
Spicy Blogroll allows you to spread more link love to your favorite bloggers and encourages click-throughs to them. Encourage those on your Blogroll to install this plugin on their blog and link back to you for your link love in return.
FAQ
How does it work?
Spicy Blogroll uses Javascript and Ajax to dynamically retrieve a number of recent posts from the sites in your Blogroll. The posts are then displayed in a pop-up hover box near the mouse position.
Spicy Blogroll will first attempt to retrieve the RSS feed from the link supplied in your Blogroll data. If not successful, it will then attempt several other feed locations to autodiscover the feed. If found this feed will be used to populate several entries (you can set the number) in the pop-up.
Spicy Blogroll does not show a preview for some of the sites listed in my Blogroll. Why is that?
The site may not have the RSS feed listed in it’s HTML or it is offline for some reason. Try locating the RSS feed URL manually and edit your Blogroll/Links entry to reflect the latest RSS URL.
Can I suggest a feature or upgrade for the plugin?
Sure, please add a comment below and include your ideas.
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[...] great posts, insights and sharing of their experiences.The Spicy Blogroll homepage is over on my michaelpedzotti.com site but I thought I would launch the official version 1.0.0 release of it here. It went live [...]
I have installed the spicy blogroll to my site and I get a fatal warning. The link works but the error persists. What have I done wrong? Tony
Hi Tony,
What version of the Spicy Blogroll do you have installed?
Michael
To entice users to mouse over there you could perhaps use WPbxslider (@adrian3.org). You could use a vertical slideshow to make motion over there, and then to increase spiciness you could add thumbnail/icon (re: color) to the previews!!
Thanks Elijah, I will take a look at that. It sounds like a great idea.
Hi there,
VERY COOL plugin! I am testing it now at one of my test sites
Question:
Is there a way to make it category specific?
So if I had a link widget set to show category ONE, your plugin does its thing. If I had one set to show category TWO, the link widget just behaves as usual and your plugin is not active.
Possible?
Nice work!
Cheers,
Gil
Not yet Gil. It does not take into account different categories. Maybe in the next release. Michael
Thanks. I ‘ll noodle and let you know if I come up with a way to do it.
Cheers,
Gil
One other question,
Can I make your plugin work with the Advanced Blogroll Widget?
http://www.yakupgovler.com/advanced-blogroll-widget.html
Thanks and cheers,
Gil
I haven’t tried that combination. Let me know what you find out.
Hi again,
I did try it and it does not work with the Advanced Blogroll Widget. If it did, it would offer some great flexibility.
Cheers,
Gil
Okay. I will add that to the development todo list
Hi Michael, I’ve installed the plugin and have noticed that rather than getting its own section in my sidebar it has mixed in with other sections.
I have a group of links in sidebar 2 that cover:
Home
My Other Websites
My Products
Other Cool Blogs
Recommended
Special Offers
and if you hover over any of those it will display the blogroll box.
Can you suggest any way of correcting this please?
Ideally I would like it to display as it does on nine95.com, any and all advice gladly accepted.
Thanks Michael
Respect and Regards, Barry
Hi Barry. I can see that. Would you please disable the plugin for a little while and I will work on it. I’d say it is related to link categories so I will have to apply a filter, under the blogger’s control of course, to include/exclude categories from the spicy blogroll function.
Thanks Michael.
Have a great weekend mate
R&R Barry
Hi, is possible to use the spicy blogroll in my template? I don’t want use it like widget. Thank you!
Hello there. It will work without using the widget version of the plugin. You must have the links (blogroll) widget loaded in a sidebar or it has nothing to work from, it is, after all, designed to spice up your blogroll. So, with the links widget loaded, activate Spicy Blogroll and your blogroll is now a little more active.
Hello, I can’t seem to get your nice plugin to work. When hovering over the blogroll in the sidebar, the plugin returns an error related to line 15 in the spicy-blogroll-ajax.php file. I’ve tried everything I can think of including different RSS links to read from (including yours)…but to no avail. I’m running WP 3.1.1
Would be grateful for any ideas on how to make this work.
Thanks!
Hi Dale and thanks for the question. Would you please send me your blog URL so that I can check a few things. Line 15 of the file you mention points to a file that is part of the plugin and I suspect it is pointing to the wrong location. If I can see your blog page with the plugin active I can start to work out what is going wrong. Thanks, Michael
Hi again Michael and thank you for the swift reply.
My blog url is – http://www.ictsector.com/blog
I don’t know if you need me to have your plugin “activated” or not when you take a look at what’s happening. Nonetheless, I will activate it right after I send this reply and perhaps if we are in the same timezone (GMT+1) then I won’t need to have it up but not functioning properly too long.
I’m actually just launching the blog this week…today in fact!
Thanks again and cheers!
Hi again Michael,
Further to my preceding post…just so you are aware, the links currently listed in my blogroll widget are not RSS feeds except one – yours!…at the bottom of the list.
I replaced the RSS feeds on the others because I couldn’t get the plugin to work and I wanted visitors to then be able to click on the link and still have something useful happen.
Anyway…you’ll see what I mean when you get a chance to check it out!
Thanks again!
Dale
Thanks Dale,
De activate it for now and I will work out whats going on.
Thanks, Michael
I have installed Spicy Blogroll – but it doesn’t appear to work for me. I have a separate page that has an autogenerated list of my links.. http://thesouthernlibertarian.com/links/
Hello SLibertarian, sorry about the massive delay in getting this comment published. It went to the spam queue and I don’t check that very often. I think because of the embedded link. Thanks also for the link back to my site. What widget do you use to publish your links? I checked the page source but could not determine enough from that.
Hi, I installed spicyblogroll but I don’t see anything happening at all when I hover over my links…
Best
Hi Tim, that’s odd
Would you please let me know what theme you are using. I have come to realise that some themes use a different class for the blogroll.
Hi, and thanks for a great plugin!
On my site http://www.loades.net/megabusblog it’s working fine on some sites but not others eg the Bus Passes Blog link. Under Advanced, the RSS feed is http://www.blog.freebustravel.co.uk/?feed=rss2 This feed is fine when viewed by other means but fails with Spicy Blogroll. I have other similar examples.