Description
This is a widget that brings up a little preview of a site into the sidebar. If you want to use this in a widget-less / static sidebar, give blogintroduction-wordpress-plugin a chance. The link is chosen by random out of the links in the WordPress link-manager. You can specify a single link-category or use all categories for the random-link-base.
You can also decide to show invisible/private links. This is for the case you want to show links as a preview you don’t want to show in the linkroll.
If you want and if there is a description for the link done in the link-description-field it would be shown.
A refreshing via AJAX could be enabled with a specific time (in seconds) when the next thumbnail would be loaded.
This widget uses the websnapr-Service for generating the thumbnail-images. Keep their term of use in mind. You should get an API-Key for free from there to use this widget and get more then 80 snapshots per hour, with key it would be about 340 per hour (250.000 a month).
Since Version 0.3.0 you could also use the image-link stored in the link-manager for containing the link to the preview-image. If no link is given the widget would use websnapr as fall back.
If you want to translate the plugin, feel free to do it! Since Version 0.2.0 the Output is fully internationalized.
To see the widget working in a production-environment, visit the author’s blog.
If you want to leave a feedback, feel free to do this on the plugin’s homepage of the author’s blog. Though the pages are in german, comments in english are wellcome, too.