Google aggregates news from over 4500 news sources, updated continously. The results can be retrieved as a number of RSS feeds, where you can create your own specific feed by specifying one of more than 40 regions/languages, and an optional topic ranging from Domestic to Most Popular to Entertainment. Currently there are nine topics, including, of course, All. In addition to this, any feed can be filtered through a search query so that only news items matching your query will be shown. Note that not all combinations of region/language and topic has been enabled by Google but it should degrade gracefully.

This plugin works both as a widget, as inline content replacement and can be used in themes. It can be used as both simultaneously, but there can be only one instance of the widget. Multiple feeds can be configured and used accordingly.

NOTE! Always upgrade to the latest version if you experience problems, most things are fixed already.

The latest version is 2.5.

If you’ve configured feeds that use character sets like cyrillic, arabic and you’re getting errors from WP when trying to view the feeds then your WP MySQL database tables may be created with the wrong character set. Let me know and I’ll give you some pointers.

Download Google News plugin

If you have a question or other comment, use the form below. Thank you!

Known bugs:

• There is a bug in the WordPress RSS engine, that sometimes show up when people use this widget. If you get something resembling “unknown function debug() in line 504 of wp-includes/rss.php” then that’s one of them. WP is aware of the problem, and apparently a fixed rss.php might be showing up in the next release. As a quick-fix edit wp-includes/rss.php and change line 503 from if ( MAGPIE_DEBUG ) { to if ( MAGPIE_DEBUG > 1 ) {
• When the widget fails with a php error like the one above, the template goes out of whack. I’ve made sure none of those are my fault in the next minor upgrade due out soon. I’m looking at better workarounds for the bug above first, so release might be a short while yet. Don’t want to spam you all with multiple releases like some widget writers…

Example of inline content replacement.

Default feed <–google-news–>, alternating randomly between two feeds:

A different feed <–google-news#non-default–>:

Shortcode test non-default [ google-news name="non-default" ]:

Shortcode test default [ google-news ]:

Random test:

Shortcodes are only available in WordPress 2.5 and up.

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google_ad_client = "pub-55555555555555555";
google_ad_width = 728;
google_ad_height = 90;
google_ad_format = "728x90_as";
google_ad_type = "image";
google_ad_channel = "555555555555";
google_color_border = "FFFFFF";
google_color_bg = "FFFFFF";
google_color_link = "7CC135";
google_color_text = "000000";
google_color_url = "";

compared to the new:

google_ad_client = "pub-5555555555555555";
google_ad_slot = "55555555555";
google_ad_width = 160;
google_ad_height = 600;

The other parts of the puzzle, including the Google javascript call, remain the same. As you can see, bare bones is your ad code, a new thing called an ad slot and a width and height. The latter two to speed up page rendering, as the javascript code can tell the browser how much space it will consume before loading the actual ad.

Now, if you have a lot of these old style ads that you would like to convert then Google provides a conversion tool. And you want to convert, as the Google interface for keeping track of ad types and their look and feel is a step up from doing it by hand or by third party tool. and it only takes a minute per ad to convert, ish.

To convert, go to your AdSense page and select AdSense Setup followed by Manage Ads. Around the top you will see a link intuitively called import your old AdSense code. Hit that, and you will be greeted with a page containing a big text area and a small one. Now copy the HTML code (well, javascript-code) from an old ad into the big area and write a useful name for that ad into the small area and hit the button. You do not need to copy anything other than the javascript variables, they are what differentiates one ad from another.

Note that if the copy HTML code part above was greek to you then run through Google’s explanation before you continue.

Now for the stupid part which Google really should fix. If there is an error in the HMTL you paste in you will get the very unfriendly error The snippet is invalid. With absolutely no explanation on what is wrong. And the useless part is that this syntax checker is actually more strict than the one Google uses in real life so the code in question may show a completely valid advert on your web page but still be rejected by this tool. Now, the most common problem here is that quite a few tools that autogenerate AdSense ads, including Adsense Manager for WordPress, will forget to print some of the values. See the example above, where the last variable google_color_url has an empty string as value? This works fine in real life, especially since it’s an image only ad in the first place. But the converter will see this as a problem and give you the error mentioned above. So if you are absolutely sure you have pasted in the correct code and still get an error then make sure all the variables actually have proper values. Changing "" to "000000"
in this case and the code passes the test and you have a new unit. 

Now you can just use the new and improved style on your web pages, and if you want to change the look and feel of an ad then you can do so through the Google AdSense interface.

 Is it worth it? Not really just for the current functionality, but you never know when the old style stops being supported or when only new style ads get a new and flashy feature that mesmerizes the ad clicking crowd. So get on the band wagon now, it’s not difficult.

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If you want to look at the source, here it is. 

And, impressively enough, Google Adsense caved on me just a day or two after. What is the world coming to…

And you can find the source for that  beauty here.

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