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April 20, 2007

Random Page Redirect For Wordpress Blogs

Michael Arrington

64 comments »

This morning we wrote about StumbleUpon’s site specific stumbling and Rafe Needleman’s idea of having a button on blogs that pulls up a random article. I pinged Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg (TechCrunch runs on Wordpress) after the post and asked him if anyone has created a plugin for Wordpress that does this. They hadn’t, so Matt wrote one and published it.

The plugin is available here. Click here to see a random TechCrunch post from the past, or use the stumblecrunch.png icon in the far right area of the navigation bar above.

If StumbleUpon does decide to offer this functionality as a widget, we’d probably integrate it. The plugin Matt created doesn’t assign any value or ratings to posts. With StumbleUpon, it’s much more likely the random post would be interesting to the reader.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Friday, April 20th, 2007 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Matt

    April 20th, 2007 at 3:10 pm

    Although it’d be a nifty widget, do you think SU would really create a site-side widget like that? I imagine they’d want to keep this function limited to use with their toolbar.

  2. Kewtr

    April 20th, 2007 at 3:14 pm

    I think the site needs an icon that sends you to a random commenter’s site. It could be a little pink slip of paper representative of when you’d get fired.

  3. Umair Salam

    April 20th, 2007 at 3:35 pm

    this will keep people busy for hours, just clicking for fun!

  4. David Ulevitch

    April 20th, 2007 at 3:42 pm

    Matt,

    It would make sense if they did offer this functionality. It would only reinforce their position.

  5. Sam Lustgarten

    April 20th, 2007 at 4:17 pm

    Great feature! Definitely going to add it to my site! Thanks Michael!

  6. Bilal Hameed

    April 20th, 2007 at 4:17 pm

    Its really cool, I am already busing stumbling techcrunch. Guess what even opened up Technorati review of june 11, 2005.

    Really coool. I am sure StumbleUpon would be releasing the widget sooon. It isnt any rocket science.

    Till that happens, will be integrating this in startupmeme.com as well.

    Thanks for the plugin Mike

  7. datter

    April 20th, 2007 at 4:28 pm

    Michael Arrington says jump, the Wordpress guys say “How high?” :)

  8. Bob

    April 20th, 2007 at 4:43 pm

    this is a great feature - because now any site that uses this will have major increases in pageviews!

    click it 10x see some content and raise pageviews.

    course pageviews is a dead metric rubel says

    i prefer the general stumbleupon method instead of locking into one web site

  9. Michael Arrington

    April 20th, 2007 at 4:52 pm

    datter - no, that certainly isn’t the case, nor should it be. I think Matt just thought this was cool and wrote it in about 5 mins.

  10. RaJesh Anandakrishnan

    April 20th, 2007 at 4:57 pm

    ha ha dater. #7 good one. Its very cool feature. Lots of TC readers have this feature in their sites up by now.

    http://www.suggestusability.com

  11. Kewtr

    April 20th, 2007 at 5:08 pm

    Not to pick nits, but why shouldn’t it be the case? I don’t know how many more popular WordPress blogs are out there than this one, but I’d imagine Matt would love to get and would quickly respond to any feedback he got from users the size of this one. For one, it’s likely important if you think it’s worth your time, and second, it’s instant visibility for whatever he does.

  12. Michael Arrington

    April 20th, 2007 at 5:13 pm

    I think wordpress is doing just fine all on their own.

  13. datter

    April 20th, 2007 at 5:56 pm

    For the record… I was just kidding, no offense intended. :)

  14. Mark

    April 20th, 2007 at 6:43 pm

    There’s another plugin that will do this called Redirection

  15. Josh

    April 20th, 2007 at 6:49 pm

    There’s actually been a wordpress plugin that does this for many months now:

    http://wasabi.pbwiki.com/Rando.....20Excerpts

  16. David Mackey

    April 20th, 2007 at 7:57 pm

    Thats a pretty sweet idea. Hopefully we will see this for other services like DotNetNuke and CommunityServer.

  17. Will

    April 20th, 2007 at 8:37 pm

    This is quite an interesting Plugin. I’m going to upload it to my Wordpress blog and test around with it. Maybe I can modify it some and make a release.

  18. Colin Dowling

    April 20th, 2007 at 9:50 pm

    I would love tha ability to choose a handful of sites to out in the widget. Most of my readers - all 5 of them - found me through techquila shots or techcrunch. Being able to repay the favor as others find my site through different channels would be cool feature, not to mention it could produce much more relevant results then a simple blogroll.

  19. Dennis Bjørn Petersen

    April 21st, 2007 at 1:41 am

    Its initiatives like that, that makes me love the blogsphere/community. Rafe and Matt’s ideas shows how fast and simple it can be!

  20. Daniel

    April 21st, 2007 at 1:42 am

    It’s cool without any doubts and it’s probably good for search engines but it hardly adds any content value like in SU.

  21. liborio

    April 21st, 2007 at 2:07 am

    ma non esiste una traduzione nella lingua più bella del mondo: l’italiano?

  22. Siddharth Thakkar

    April 21st, 2007 at 3:21 am

    Whee!!

    This means hours of surfing random posts on TechCrunch! Yay!

  23. Smiler

    April 21st, 2007 at 3:30 am

    Dont you think it’s a bit naughty to just appropriate someone elses idea and then use it as your own on your website? IE ‘Stumbling’ buttons?

  24. MyBlogLoggers

    April 21st, 2007 at 3:45 am

    this is a great plugin. my dead old post will get a new ray of life.

    thanks

  25. Adi Crazy

    April 21st, 2007 at 4:58 am

    Great feature! Another feather in MySpace’s cap! :)

  26. a

    April 21st, 2007 at 7:04 am

    tushar gianchandani

    I know you don’t like to forward mails. I am really sorry to bother you. If you have a heart and like to help a family, please forward this mail. Every time you forward this it will add 5 cents per email ID to AOL and they will deposit it into my bank account. Which will help me save my husband

  27. Jason Alba

    April 21st, 2007 at 7:37 am

    This is pretty cool - kudos to Rafe for suggesting it and matt for implementing it so quick. Fortunately Wordpress isn’t a Fortune 500 (or whatever) company - this would have sat in strategy meetings, design, beta, etc. for months :p

    I’ll be putting this on my blog but wondering, based on the input here, where to find “the latest and greatest?” If you develop the latest and greatest please go to my website and let me know (through the Contact Us form).

    Jason Alba
    CEO - JibberJobber.com

  28. Andy Beard

    April 21st, 2007 at 10:03 am

    The SU script requires that the referring URL is SU themselves or the toolbar, it can’t be harnessed to Stumble through sites without them in someway being invloved as the referrer.

    I hit Stumble on Wordpress.com, and the first site I came across was an affiliate site that has been running for at least 3 months, filled with Clickbank advertising. Not a splog but still breaking TOS

    It would be easy to knock up a plugin which stumbles through the top 100 posts, or the top 100 posts in the last 3 months.

    I actually prefer the plugins that Yackyack.com just released, that allow you to highlight content that deserved more attention and comments.

  29. David Cassel

    April 21st, 2007 at 12:22 pm

    Great!

    We’re a WordPress blog, and last fall we created our own random
    page server for 10 Zen Monkeys with a six-line CGI script.

    http://www.aolwatch.org/cgi-bin/random10.cgi

    It’s one of those ideas that’s simple enough to execute — but very meaningful to users! (And every day, we get a few dozen extra pageviews…)

  30. Seshu

    April 21st, 2007 at 1:23 pm

    Stuff-a-Blog does something very similar. By using its BStir service, any blog surprise its readers with a random post from the archives. You can give a new life to all the excellent posts you’ve written in the past…

    site: http://stuffablog.com

  31. David Dalka

    April 21st, 2007 at 2:13 pm

    It’s unfortunate that Wordpress doesn’t chose to focus on serious compatibility and security issues between versions, existing plugins, themes, etc. before random and fun suggestions such as this.

  32. Indian Restaurants

    April 21st, 2007 at 2:52 pm

    How does anyone find StumbleUpon useful anyway?
    I just don’t get how it would be of any use to anybody…

    Also it seems like Google is gonna come out with something very similiar soon, do you guys notice a trend where Google just wants to be a jack of all trades? Brace yourselves for the biggest internet monopoly– Google.

    Just my opinion.

    Regards,
    Restaurant Guy.

  33. vurdlak

    April 21st, 2007 at 3:34 pm

    is there anything similar I could place on my blogger blog?

    I am on blogger beta, but use standard template without widgets…

    would appreciate it much… even pay for it maybe…

  34. vurdlak

    April 21st, 2007 at 6:27 pm

    ?

  35. TRon

    April 21st, 2007 at 6:58 pm

    Two words for you. Wow.

    Do you think the plugin is a wordpress killer in its own?

  36. Hari

    April 21st, 2007 at 7:13 pm

    Hey vurdlak, stuff-a-blog mentioned above can do the trick for u.

  37. Wes

    April 21st, 2007 at 9:17 pm

    I think its a good feature which is very easy to implement even without a plug in.

  38. 5dig

    April 21st, 2007 at 10:04 pm

    very good.

  39. Mike @ Emerging Earth

    April 21st, 2007 at 10:16 pm

    I personally prefer the Related Posts plugin as it approximates a real recommendation engine — but hey, to each his own.

  40. Kabalyero

    April 21st, 2007 at 11:33 pm

    Ho ho, nice plugin! Great job!

  41. max

    April 22nd, 2007 at 12:24 am

    this is tight, great job Michael and Matt!

  42. vvv

    April 22nd, 2007 at 2:18 am

    good plugin,
    look what I build with it in less than 30 minutes :D

    a RANDOM VIDEO SITE powered with wordpress

    http://vvv.blinkr.net/

    enjoy :)

  43. Mia Doney

    April 22nd, 2007 at 6:23 am

    wow a grate plugin, nice work

  44. Shannon Whitley

    April 22nd, 2007 at 12:24 pm

    I was also inspired to write ‘yet another random plugin.’

    ‘No Life’ takes all of the website links from your approved comments and let’s you take a tour via a blogshow.

    http://www.voiceoftech.com/swhitley/?page_id=220

    To further prove that I have absolutely no life, I added the ability to share No Life files from multiple sites. So you can use No Life indefinitely by adding files from other sites. Enjoy!

  45. Sprague Dawley

    April 22nd, 2007 at 2:07 pm

    Mullenweg’s plugin as written won’t work for people still using the 2.0.X branch of WP. They’ll have to edit the random-redirect.php file and remove the post_type reference:

    http://wordpress.org/extend/pl.....#post-1150

    I’m sure Matt will add a test for WP version, but this is a quick workaround.

  46. John

    April 22nd, 2007 at 2:20 pm

    Very cool plug in. I’m a big fan of StumbleUpon and WP. Going to see if I can setup a WP blog on my new site. Enjoy reading your blog. Keep up the great work.

  47. engtech

    April 23rd, 2007 at 1:35 pm

    Hey, this works for any wordpress.com blog now as well.

    WOOT!

    http://engtech.wordpress.com/2.....stumbling/

  48. Ad®ian

    April 23rd, 2007 at 10:17 pm

    Way to democratize the market Mike!

  49. Henri van den Hoof

    April 27th, 2007 at 8:34 am

    Cool! I’ve added it to my Dutch B2B Marketing & Sales blog too :-)

  50. wolkanca

    April 29th, 2007 at 3:16 am

    Cool, thanks.

  51. Lora

    April 30th, 2007 at 3:09 pm

    Here’s another random post plugin that works with WP 2.0.x.

    http://www.analogpoint.com/wp-plugins/random-post/

  52. PreobrajenskySuka2

    May 7th, 2007 at 12:01 pm

    Sorry, but colleague, you are sure?
    prof.Preobrajensky.
    Good luck!

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