A lot of work has already been done in the area of desktop widgets by people like https://weblogs.sdn.sap.com/pub/u/251690412 and tarun.telang2/blog just to name a few. Although desktop widgets didn't worked out for me yet, a SDN Points on Your Desktop inspired me while I was working on my new blog. Wouldn't it be nice to have your SDN points in a dedicated space in your blog?
With this idea in my head I grabed a basic plugin source here and a feed import plugin there, took a tip from PHP expert Nigel James to look into curl for fetching websites and the result is the SDN Contributor Wordpress widget.
A picture can say more that a thousand words but for software it is better to see it running live. If you want to take a look I'm using the widget in a test instance of my blog at the moment.
It is designed to work as a sidebar widget in your wordpress blog and displays your name on SDN, your contribution points and your latest blog posts. There are also a couple of minor things to configure like the widget title, the number of blog posts to display and if you want to have the publishing date and a short desciption for each blog post.
For the widget to work, it is necessary that you provide it with your Business Card id and your blogger id. If you don't provide any of them (maybe you haven't written a blog on SDN yet) its related information simple won't be displayed.
I have set up a Wiki page on my own server where you will find a lot of additional information, installation instructions and a download link for the widget.
As far as I know it isn't possible to add new plugins to a blog hosted by Wordpress.com (that's why I moved my new blog to my own server) so you have to host your blog on your own to make this work.
It always good to get some feedback so let me know what you think, if and where you use it for your blog and if you would like to see more or other information displayed. Maybe you have your own blog but it's not running on Wordpress. The basic functionality should be fairly easy to port to other platforms as well so don't hasitate and give it a try.
Oh and I have to admit, the new blog editor here is so much better. Thanks SDN!
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