Embedded Components and Tools Blog Center

Ron Fredericks writes: This is my first WordPress Widget development effort, or my first WordPress *anything* pretty much. However, I provide my best effort to offer a complete and useful widget following the guidlines published by WordPress and the spirit of quality. It is a widget following Atomattic’s Widget offering for managing our blog’s sidebar. It was inspired by a conversation with a friend of mine, Mukesh Lulla, co-founder of embedded security software provider TeamF1. Mukesh suggested that I might want to have a list of news and blog links that are relevant to my user base. This is the resulting widget I dreamed up. I hope you like it, but your comments and guidance are welcome either which way.

You can see Embedded Components’ blinesAgg widget in action on this blog’s sidebar with the title: Embedded Device Updates

Download Widget

You can download and extract the zipped blinesAgg.php version 1.0.2 widget from here: blinesAgg.zip

Features

The blinesAgg WordPress widget displays a list of selected news and blog RSS syndicated feeds as a list of links:

• Links can be collected from a neat RSS service called Bloglines
• Links are collected using the Bloglines search engine
• You select the desired search words to search for links you think might be cool for those that read your blog
• No user account on Bloglines is used, just their search engine
• Any number of additional RSS feeds can be aggregated from extra sites to complete your list
• Page access to RSS feeds can be cached using an embedded copy of lastRSS, by Vojtech Semecky, for efficient use of your web server

Once blinesAgg widget is installed, you can configure the widget using a simple web form:

• Title
• Number of links to display
• Bloglines search parameters: search words to use, and search words to exclude
• *List of other RSS feeds you would like to include in your list of aggregated links

*Because sometimes there may not be enough links found within your requested Bloglines search. Given some combinations of search and avoidance words, you may want to list extra RSS feeds to be used to fill out the remaining total number of links you would like to display. That’s why I added the extra feeds form entry. But, you may want to skip the Bloglines search feature and just use the extra feeds as your RSS aggregator.

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Technorati Tags: Ron Fredericks, WordPress, Widget, Mukesh Lulla, TeamF1, Embedded Components, blinesAgg, Bloglines, RSS

What shoes do you wear? Business. Engineer. Something magical? It takes all three to develop a new embedded device… The dichotomy between the engineering community that builds products and management that funds the production of products is where the magic lives. Ethical considerations seem to me to be the common ground between these two groups within the corporation. Build a good ethic within your organization so executives can fund the correct projects designed by professionals with the requirements clients genuinely desire to use safely.

One resource for learning how:
Rethinking Business Ethics
Rosenthal, Sandra B.; Buchholz, Rogene A.

– Ron Fredericks

Technorati Tags: Business, Engineer, embedded device, Ethical, corporation, executives, professionals, requirements