I’m in the process of working on improved widgets for the sidebar.  The main theme I’ve been working on for a while now (FallSeason by Sadish Bala) has a nice sidebar section for feeds that displays an RSS icon next to the link for the two main feeds, and the Meta widget doesn’t display these.  Making a new widget turns out to be pretty easy, so I copied the code from wp-includes\widgets.php, and I got to thinking about whether there were other feeds I might want to include.  I remembered downloading a plugin called DualFeeds from Stephen Cronin so I went to check it out.  While looking at his web site (to see if there were any updates), I found a link to an article about category feeds.  Hmm, great idea.

Lorelle on WordPress has an article called Understanding, Using, and Customizing WordPress Blog Feeds that provides a comprehensive look at how to offer category and tag feeds.

Great.  Now I want to provide an enhanced Categories widget.  I’m actually disappointed that the current widgets aren’t more flexible and that there isn’t an easy way to extend them without replacing them.  But that’s a topic for another post.