Google News Widget wp plugin 0.2/0.3 released

Thanks for your kind feedback.

Yes, a new version has been created again. From the readme file:

Description:

With this plugin, you can display a list of the latest news (by Google News) given localization (country/language), search word(s) or topic and the number of latest news you want to show. The list look & feel is customizable too. It works as a widget or shortcode (in post/pages), so you can show your news in any widget-ready are of your wordpress blog or any post or page of your choice.

Usage:

As a widget:

  • Drag & Drop your widget in the widget-ready area
  • Choose a title to be given to this news list
  • Choose the location of the news you wish to display
  • Select either the topic you need to cover or search word(s) (if you define both, the search keys will be ignored)
  • Select whether you want a dotted list (default) or a numbered/ordered list
  • Select whether you want the linked news pages to open up in a new page (default) or in the same page.
  • Click on ‘Save’ (and Close, if you want)

As a shortcode:

  • In Posts/Pages->Add New/Edit of your wp admin page, select HTML in the entry form
  • enter [gnews location="xx"]
    where xx is any Google’s location-code of the news you wish to display. A list of Google’s localization codes is here.

That’s the sole mandatory attribute. Optional attributes are:

  • search: search-words according to google search syntax (read more below) (default: none)
  • topic: any of Google’s topic-codes (default: Top Stories). Here is the list of Google’s topics.
  • num: number of news to be displayed (default: 3)
  • list: either “UL” or “OL” to get unordered or ordered lists
  • target: either “_blank” or “_self” to get links opened in a new/the same windows.

Example: [gnews location="es" topic="" search="sport" topic="e" num="8" list="UL" target="_self"]

Please note the following Google quirks:

  1. Not all topics are set for all country/language.  If you select a topic for a country where this is not provided (by Google) then the “Top stories” (the default) will be displayed instead.
  2. Google (not me!) allows to search by topic OR by search-word(s). The two “filters” cannot apparently work together (i.e. you cannot search for “hockey” in topic “Sport”).
  3. Because of the above, if topic AND search-keys are both indicated, then the search-keys are ignored (but no, no error message).
  4. The search syntax is that indicated by Google. In other words, if in the search results:
    • all the words need to be present, then enter space-separated words (word1 word2 etc);
    • any of the words can be present, then enter words separated by OR (word1 OR word2);
    • the exact phrase needs to be present, then enter the phrase delimited by double quotes (“exact phrase”).
  5. The maximum number of displayable articles depends on the number of articles stored into the XML page (RSS feed page) of Google news website (i.e. if you wish to display the latest 15 news and the XML page contains 10 news only, then only 10 will be displayed).
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Comments

Hi, I was trying your plugin for two blogs – good idea for integration of Google News. But it was disturbing both blogs. Example: Changing or writing an article the blog was unable to show the right page – only white screen with sign could be see. Deactivating and deleting the plugin everything worked fine again with both blogs (WP 2.9.2). I saw this sign in some other websites, for example at on the right side below “Top News”. Any idea what happenend?

You really don’t give an example of the short codes in the write up here – i.e. how are they to be wrapped in an article assuming something like [ca][s] would be for english canadian sports news?

And in my sidebar widget there must be a conflicting plugin since it works fine in other blogs.

The Latest Google News
Error message: http://news.google.com/news?cf=all&ned=us&output=rss&q=sport not found or is no standard XML file.

help please.

The post formatting has been fixed: you can see the examples now. Thanks for highlighting this.
About your error message. I have seen it before but normally it was for my other plugin (RSS just better) where I could grab not properly written XML files. But Google, should always have proper xml files. It might have been a temp problem by Google back when you rote the coment. Could you set up a temp page where the plugin generates that error message for me to see, please?

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