Kolbu

Displays N first news items from a selectable Google News RSS feed, inline or as a widget.

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 2.2.

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.

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CNN has a number of RSS feeds with current news available, on a number of topics.

This plugin works both as a widget, as inline content replacement and can be used in themes. It can be used as all three simultaneously, but there can be only one instance of the widget. Multiple feeds can be configured and used accordingly. Clicking on a news item will of course take you straight to the relevant article at CNN, as per CNN Terms of Use.

I know there are generic RSS feed widgets out there, but I figured with so many CNN feeds they warranted their own widget with easier configuration than your average generic RSS widget.

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

The latest version is 2.2.

Download CNN News plugin

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Very simple widget plugin that shows the NASA Image Of The Day thumbnail and a few words of text. Clicking on the thumbnail opens the correct NASA page for a larger image and accompanying text. The plugin now uses a NASA RSS feed for information. No local storage needed, the feed and image is fetched every time. Does anyone need caching here?

Installation instructions:
Unzip in wp-content/plugins directory, enable plugin and then use as any other WordPress widget.

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Moving this site from WordPress 2.3.3 to 2.5RC2 was largely uneventful. But I recommend waiting until there is a properly scripted upgrade path before you try unless you’re comfortable with MySQL restores and the occational PHP hacking to get a particular theme or plugin to work properly. Things have certainly changed under the hood, and quite a few addons need to be rewritten. Some of these rewrites are in the pipeline, so check out the WordPress codex for status.

Since I was fiddling with the site anyway, I decided to go for a new theme as well. It required some code changes to work properly, for example a simple thing as showing comments on pages was missing. Easily added. I also fiddled with the look&feel, so it’s not really a clean Prosumer theme anymore. Not enough changes to warrant a rebadge and release though. Not entirely happy about the colour scheme either, so here today gone tomorrow. Leave a comment if you can recommend a great theme that not too many others use.

Found some cool new plugins while updating. Like the Democracy Polls widget on the left, just below the ahem one click is enough Income widget.

Another thing I found out about WordPress in the upgrade process was that there are quite a number of hard coded references to your web site url in the database. Not just the single config entry you’d expect. So if you want to fire up a copy of the site under another name to see how 2.5 worked without destroying your primary site, you need to dump the database, do a search & replace on the dump and then restore to the new location.

The logo image is an umodified photo taken at low shutter speed in a tunnel, just cropped to show the interesting part.

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The old style Google AdSense for Content HTML code had a lot of information about the look and feel of an ad. Half a dozen colour values for background, foreground, links, text etc along with ad size, ad type and of course your ad code and perhaps channel code. Bit of a mess trying to keep track of everything, even with helpful addons like Adsense Manager (which sucks after v2.5). So Google has moved more of the fiddly bits into their AdSense administrative interface and the new thing is called an AdSense Unit. Old style HTML code:

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Picking an engine for your web site can be tricky stuff, especially for the unsavvy. Getting it right the first time isn’t easy. But don’t let that stop you from experimenting. There are tons of free and not so free software packages out there that once installed and configured will let you produce content without worrying about the underlying nitty gritty.

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