Recently I highlighted a site named DotNetKicks which is like Digg.com, but targetted to .NET technology. In particular I thought it was a smart move for them to share in their advertising revenue with those who submit stories.

Well to make it easier to kick stories from the convenience of your favorite RSS Aggregator, I wrote an IBlogExtension plugin so that you can submit/kick/unkick stories from RSS Bandit or any RSS Aggregator that supports the IBlogExtension plugin model (.NET 1.1 must also be on the machine).

Just download and unzip the extension to your plugins directory. The default location for RSS Bandit would be c:\Program Files\RssBandit\plugins.

Once you have it installed, restart RSS Bandit and right click on any feed item and select the DotNetKick This - Configure… menu option.

Context Menu

This will bring up the plugin configuration dialog. You should leave the URLs as they are. I made left them to be configurable in case the URL ever changes. Just enter your DotNetKicks username and password and click OK.

This will save your username and password in an xml settings file with the password heavily encrypted.

Now you can right click on a story to submit it to DotNetKicks. If the story hasn’t been submitted, you will get the following dialog.

Submit a Story Dialog

This form is pretty self-explanatory.

If a story has already been submitted, you will see the following dialog which allows you to kick it or unkick it (essentially adding your vote to the story or removing it (editor’s note: At the time of this writing, the unkick function was not working).

Kick/Unkick a story dialog

The API for DotNetKicks was published today on Gavin Joyce’s wiki. This was quite a turnaround as I emailed him on friday asking if there was a web-based API. We went back and forth formulating the API and he said he would work on it over the weekend. This morning, he sent me the URL to his wiki page describing the API! Much of the API was inspired by the del.icio.us API.

If you want to learn to write an IBlogExtension from scratch, check out my tutorial here. In this case, I was able to get a jumpstart by using Dare’s excellent del.icio.us plugin as a starting point.

Another plugin I wrote a while ago is the improved w.bloggar plugin for RSS Bandit that should hopefully be included in the next release of RSS Bandit.

Once again, in case you missed the first link to this DotNetKicks plugin, [DOWNLOAD] it.