Contribution to Google News Widget (& Shortcode) Plugin for WordPress

I’d been looking for a good plugin to feed local news to my condo’s website and wasn’t really finding any that seemed to be doing the trick for me, but then I stumbled on Stefania Marchisio’s Google News Widget (& Shortcode) Plugin for WordPress.

It looked pretty good, but unfortunately the built in options, while supporting “localized news”, weren’t quite as specific as I’d like. I live in the US, and it’s a pretty big country. While some news is relevant all across the country (and as I live near the Capitol, in Washington DC, the most major news likely is somewhat local), I really wanted news that was more specific to the immediate area. Seeing as the plugin was just making use of Google’s own RSS news feeds, I looked into it and discovered that Google actually supports localizing the feeds by zipcode and by city names. I took a look at her code and came up with a way to essentially implement this option, and violà, extremely local news!

I submitted my changes to Stefania, and she graciously approved of them and officially implemented them, so now everyone can benefit!

Go check it out.