My alternative to Blogrush
As promised earlier, here is the update on what I added to my sidebar instead of the Blogrush widget. It is a WordPress plugin by Sarah from StuffbySarah.net. Officially it’s called “What others are saying” and what it does is showing a list with links to the 5 latest posts by people from your personal blogroll. (I renamed it “Others say”, because that was short enough to fit in my sidebar.)
I know that this is not exactly the same thing that Blogrush did, because this obviously doesn’t bring in any traffic to my own page (not that BR ever did, either). It just gives visitors a chance to discover other blogs I like, plus it gives out some link-love to people whose writing I enjoy. Win-win as far as I am concerned, because offering my readers a chance to find interesting new sites was the main reason I installed BR in the first place.
Another thing I like about this plugin is, that I have total control over which websites it shows in this list. Well, since I have added more than 5 blogs to it and it shows only the latest 5 headlines, I guess the ultimate decision about who is shown depends on who updates most often. But at least I won’t have any spammers in this list, and no make-money-online blogs or any other crap I can’t really control.
When I have more time I will fiddle around a bit with the formatting to make it stand out a bit more, but for now this will have to do as I am just getting ready for the drive back to Leipzig.
Let me know what you think about this plugin, if you would ever click on such a list - and I wouldn’t mind if anybody could think of a better name for it (preferable not more than 3 words long). 
October 15th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
Thanks for the mention and glad you like the plugin. If you’ve got the latest version running you can easily change how many posts are displayed. Perhaps I should incorporate a random option too? So you can just show a random X posts.
Personally I’ve clicked on a few latest posts this way. A good headline will catch your eye.
Feel free to let me know of any ideas you have for improvements
October 15th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
Yeah, I should have mentioned that the number of posts shown is changeable. I just wanted to let others find that out for themselves and not give all the secrets away up front. (In other words, I just forgot. LOL)
At the moment I can’t think of any improvements that’d be necessary, but if anything comes to mind, I’ll let you know.
October 17th, 2007 at 8:52 am
What a cool plugin! Thanks for the link on your sidebar. I might give this a try.