FeedWordPress Widget: If you blog it, it is no dream

Less than a week after blogging my wish for a widget that would allow people to add links to their sites (no matter where they are hosted, they just need a valid feed), which in turn would be automatically entered into FeedWordPress and make the population of an aggregation site simple…it has arrived in the form of the Add Links Widget. Disco!!!

Thanks to Andre Malan and Vince Ng, who conceptualized and executed this widget beautifully, the widget works fine and I have included it three places so far:

• And on the UMW Blogs Clubs and Organizations blog, so that any club or organization associated with UMW can drop of their link, and have their recent news show up in that blog, moreover, they will be automatically added to the Contributors list;
• On the WPMu Ed blog I keep, so that other people that are blogging their work with WordPress Mu in education can easily contribute;
• On the Reading Capital site so that anyone who wants to share their blog posts in a central aggregated space can do it by simply dropping off a link.

This is very cool, and they added a password option if you need to limit who can add their site. Also, the link will be held in quarantine until you approve it as a valid and relevant contribution, which will take care of the spam issues. So, in short, this solution is pretty much fully functional out-of-the-box.

Additionally, hats off to Charles Johnson (a.k.a. Rad Geek) who emailed me about the project and may be working on a more fully featured, integrated solution for the FeedWordPress plugin, but that would require our help. His plugin has become a staple of much of the syndication framework we are working through at UMW, and I really believe schools that are using and relying on a suite of plugins should strongly consider donating to the developers who create and maintain the plugins they depend on. This is a community that works because people do—and UMW, for one, should be donating more back to this community in good faith. I’m kinda getting tired of the way we are constantly crying poverty all the time as an institution, and while we are indeed poor—how much poorer would we truly be without this awesome community of developers, trouble-shooters, and full-fledged support?