Give Me Random or Give Me…

Posted on by Alan Levine

The Trick, Said Quick

Create a link on your WordPress site to a randomly selected post with just 6 extra characters added to your web address… Give visitors a way to wander down your wondrous halls, and bust up the dominant reverse chronology dominance of posts.

It’s like… magic.

The QRS Wheel of (mis)Fortune flickr photo by Kris Krug shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

The Trick, In Intricate

To generate a link to a random post you can mess with plugins or go crazy with custom code as I have done (and again).

It’s way easier than you might think.

Okay, start with the URL to your WordPress site. Okay, I know mine! It’s http://cogdogblog.com/.

Then… just tack on ?random to the end.

Go. CogDogBlog gives you a random post http://cogdogblog.com/?random.

Use these in your menus, sidebars, send to your parents?

Sadly, it does not seem to work within category or tag archives. Also, it will only work (I am mostly guessing) on blogs that have a normal WordPress Loop on the front of the site. So it will not work on The PressEd 2019 site (https://2019.pressedconf.org/?random) nor on the DS106 site https://ds106.us/?random because they have different front page content.

But this does work on WordPress.com hosted sites, maybe Samantha Clarke’s https://seriousgameslife.wordpress.com/?random.

Even a random “slide” from this presentation http://show.cogdog.casa/pressed19/?random.

The Trick, Done Slick

The Trick, Give it a Kick

Tweet back a reply with an example you tried and/or how might you use this?

Featured dog trick image by Katrin B. from Pixabay