Today my pal Abesh pinged me because the widget would throw an XML error and ruin the beautiful new layout in his blog. A quick look at a couple of other blogs using the WordPress widget or the hosted version showed the same error. After diving into the code I discovered that the fine folks from SDN had made a minor change in the blog feed XML. They removed DOCTYPE tag (which shouldn’t have been there in the first place) and revealed a bug in my work around to remove the unnecessary tag.

If you got some feedback lately about a ugly error in your blogs sidebar, go get the update and don’t forget to deactivate it first before replacing the files.

PS: I recently updated the widget to WordPress 2.5, did you noticed? Abesh is probably right and I should submit it to the WP Plugin databse.

In the last couple of days I had some time to work on a widget for a new instance of this blog I’m builing up at the moment. The idea was to have a sidebar widget with some information from my SDN profile like total points and the latest blog posts.

My blog is running on WordPress. Because I didn’t had any experience with PHP I found the del.icio.us widget by Automattic, Inc. very useful as a basic example for a plugin including how to build the widget configuration view. Frank Bueldges work on WP-RSSImport fitted well for reading the blog feed. Nigel James pointed me to curl which did a great job fetching a SDN Business Card related website to parse it for the name and total number of points.

The widget is called SDN Contributor and now available as version 1.0 and you can see it running on my new blog. I’ve set up a wiki page with all further information like installation instructions and download location. If you’re a SDN member and have a WordPress blog under your own control, give it a try.