View a Random Post Plugin for WordPress
Necessity, as they say, is the Mother of Invention.
As your blog grows in size, as it invariably will, your new readers will find it more difficult to know where to start. Sure, reading the most current posts are a given, but what after that? Of course, you should also have a list that displays the most popular posts so the reader can see what your best or, at least, what are the most viewed posts. But you can do a little more and giving the reader the ability to read a random post may be just the trick.
It was with this thought that I contacted a WordPress Developer, Lee Blue, to develop just such a plugin. And Lee has done a wonderful job. He has provided a simple, yet effective plugin that produces a link that when clicked loads a random post. Not only does this bring to light older posts that may have been overlooked but increases the pages read per visitor, which is always a good thing.
I did try some other plugins that claimed to do what View Random Post does, but none worked in all the browsers under both the Mac and PC operating system. Please try this helpful WordPress plugin, you won’t be disappointed.
From the plugin site:
This plugin will put a widget on your sidebar with a link to view a random post. There are a few other similar plugins already but we haven’t been able to find any that do exactly what we wanted. We were after a very simple way to put a link in your sidebar which, when clicked, will take your visitor to one of your published posts.
When your visitors click the link to view a random post, the plugin keeps track of all the posts they have viewed via the random post link so that it doesn’t send them to a post they have already seen until they have seen all the posts once. Then it won’t send them to the same post three times until they have already seen all the posts 2 times (and so on).
Download the plugin – View Random Post
PS – Lee has also written a helpful plugin for selling products on your WordPress blog. This WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin can be found here: http://www.phpurchase.com/
Want to know what Shell is doing?
4 Responses to “View a Random Post Plugin for WordPress”
By SEO Resource on Jan 27, 2010 | Reply
I’ve pared down my plug-ins recently due to a security breach in WordPress, but the one you’re advocating for is worth a look at since it will keep readers engaged on the blog.
By andrew Bossola on Jan 28, 2010 | Reply
It goes to show that good quality content goes a long way. I’ve spent the last few hours reading and checking out this plugin as well as some info on Lee’s site. I’ve solved multiple problems and have a few new tools that I was missing out on… Nice work as always…
By internet marketing san antonio on Feb 3, 2010 | Reply
I’ve spent the last few hours reading and checking out this plug in as well as some info on Lee’s site. I’ve solved multiple problems.
By sherrylinx on Mar 31, 2010 | Reply
It’s a nice post. This is View a Random Post Plugin for WordPress exactly what I’m looking for. Thanks Shell Harris for this post.