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 
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.
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.
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.
this will keep people busy for hours, just clicking for fun!
Matt,
It would make sense if they did offer this functionality. It would only reinforce their position.
Great feature! Definitely going to add it to my site! Thanks Michael!
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
Michael Arrington says jump, the Wordpress guys say “How high?”
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
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.
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.sugg...stusability.com
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.
I think wordpress is doing just fine all on their own.
For the record… I was just kidding, no offense intended.
There’s another plugin that will do this called Redirection
There’s actually been a wordpress plugin that does this for many months now:
http://wasabi.p...ndom%20Excerpts
Thats a pretty sweet idea. Hopefully we will see this for other services like DotNetNuke and CommunityServer.
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.
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.
Its initiatives like that, that makes me love the blogsphere/community. Rafe and Matt’s ideas shows how fast and simple it can be!
It’s cool without any doubts and it’s probably good for search engines but it hardly adds any content value like in SU.
ma non esiste una traduzione nella lingua più bella del mondo: l’italiano?
Whee!!
This means hours of surfing random posts on TechCrunch! Yay!
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?
this is a great plugin. my dead old post will get a new ray of life.
thanks
Great feature! Another feather in MySpace’s cap!
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
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
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.
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.aolw...in/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…)
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
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.
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.
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…
?
Two words for you. Wow.
Do you think the plugin is a wordpress killer in its own?
Hey vurdlak, stuff-a-blog mentioned above can do the trick for u.
I think its a good feature which is very easy to implement even without a plug in.
very good.
I personally prefer the Related Posts plugin as it approximates a real recommendation engine — but hey, to each his own.
Ho ho, nice plugin! Great job!
this is tight, great job Michael and Matt!
good plugin,
look what I build with it in less than 30 minutes
a RANDOM VIDEO SITE powered with wordpress
http://vvv.blinkr.net/
enjoy
wow a grate plugin, nice work
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.voic...ey/?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!
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://wordpres...ies=4#post-1150
I’m sure Matt will add a test for WP version, but this is a quick workaround.
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.
Hey, this works for any wordpress.com blog now as well.
WOOT!
http://engtech....ndom-stumbling/
Way to democratize the market Mike!
Cool! I’ve added it to my Dutch B2B Marketing & Sales blog too
Cool, thanks.