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RSSNew WordPress Plugin: Buddy Love
I was talking to a couple of people who were unhappy with the demise of the Cliq network, which allowed them to show headlines from their friends’ sites in their sidebar, so I offered to try to mimic the basic functionality in a WordPress plugin.
Well, the result was version 1.0 of Buddy Love. The plugin is a WordPress widget that will pull a configurable number of the latest headlines from sites listed in your WordPress blogroll and show them on your sidebar. It should let you show a little more love to your friends by pointing people to their latest content, and you can even configure a unique icon for each individual site. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that the plugin is a bit slow because there is some overhead associated with going out and grabbing the latest headlines from your friends’ sites. If you experience slowness, I can only suggest cutting the number of headlines you show.
If you decide to take Buddy Love for a spin, be sure to let me know what you think.
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February 20th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Have you ever heard of MagpieRSS? I think it does pretty much the same thing (minus the ability to add the custom icon – which could be hand coded) but it seemed really efficient.
Does Buddy Love cache the headlines on your site so it doesn’t have to pull every headline every time? If I’m not mistaken, that’s how Magpie worked, so it cut down on some of the overhead at least.
February 20th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
Thanks for the tip on Magpie. Buddy Love runs on SimpleXML, so there is no caching. That’s what slows it down. I was trying to figure out a simple way to cache for the next version…
February 21st, 2008 at 6:17 pm
I just put out the next version and it caches using some internal Wordpress functions that are based on Magpie.
February 21st, 2008 at 6:41 pm
Good job!