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Recently I have been playing with a some what black hat script, OK it isn't some what it is dark as they come.  As I began to expand the possibilites of what could be done with this script in tying in several blogs together I developed a need to do a "random" post.  As in one that would pull a post at random and display it.  I started out doing this with some PHP but the way I know how to do it in my limited non programmer way was actually leading to a page that included the random post.

For reasons I can not publicly divulge at this time that was not good enough I needed the post itself as in its full URL to be in the browser so that my script would access the right data.  After fighting my poor ability to use PHP for about an hour this morning I decided to do a Google search for "random redirect"  The first result was a Word Press Plugin that you guessed it does random redirection to a post on your site.

The Plug In can be downloaded here, Random Redirection Plug In

The plug in is beyond simple to use, you just download it and activate it.  There is zero configuration beyond that!  All you need to do is put   /?random    after the root of your blog.

So for instance if your blog is at the top level domain just use

http://www.yourdomain.com/?random

Say you host at a secondary level like /blog then you would use

http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/?random

Or if you are on the free word press (please buy a domain and some cheap hosting if you are, you get so much more freedom if you self host)  then you would use.

http://www.yourname.wordpress.com/?random

Now I really think I may actually hire out someone to customize this for me so you have a control panel and can select a random post from a specific or several specific categories.  Like here I could limit the random to say search marketing and blogging.  Or even have several random options like random-1 going to a random search article and random-2 going to a random article on telecom.

If you want to beat me to the punch on this, go ahead, go for it.  The links you can gain from a cool plug in are worth the few hundred bucks at rentacoder!  If not I will get to it, this works for me now as is.

The lesson here though is ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS check first for a plug in if you want WordPress to do something, I wasted about an hour of my time on a nice Saturday Morning, got frustrated and even snapped at the kids for making noise while I was "trying to think".  All I really needed to do was do one google search, download a free plug in and click activate.  Lesson learned! Don't make the same mistake I did, that is 60 minutes of my life I will never get back.

~ Jack

Technorati Tags: wordpress, word press, plugins, plug in, random redirect, black hat, blackhat, blogging, blog, blog plugin, blog marketing, seo, sem, search marketing

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