King  Gary 

I’m releasing a plugin which I’ll call the Post Stumbler WordPress plugin (originally to be called the “Stumble Upon” WordPress plugin, but it doesn’t use Stumble Upon at all – even though it tries to mimic its functionality) because that will help most people to understand what it does.

After building this, I found a post that was made over at TechCrunch which discusses about how it would be interesting if WordPress could have similar functionality to what Stumble Upon provides, so I hope that this fulfills that need.

What it does

It basically adds functionality to your WordPress blog which allows visitors to view a randomly selected post on your blog, with a higher probability of choosing popular posts, and with the option of only showing recent posts. You also have the option of giving recent posts more chances to be shown to visitors if you think that your most recent posts are more interesting to your visitors.

Example

To see how this works, click on the links in the sidebar on this page which say “random post” and “random recent post”, which are right below the search box. They are self-explanatory.

How to install

The plugin does have a requirement, which is the Popularity Contest WordPress plugin (install it like any other plugin; just upload it to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory and then activate it in your admin panel), so go and install that first.

When that’s done, download and install my plugin like a normal plugin, too. And you’re done! No configuration is required.

There are two important links that you need to link to. They are:

• http://www.yourblog.com/?stumble
  • Replace yourblog.com with your own blog’s URL, of course. This URL will show the visitor a random post but it gives a higher weight to popular posts, which increases the chances that visitors will land on a popular post. This is a really cool way of hand-holding your visitors to the great posts on your blog, without linking them to specific posts.
• http://www.yourblog.com/?stumble&date
  • Again, replace yourblog.com with your own blog’s URL. This URL will point your visitor to a random post, again, based on the post’s popularity, but also, based on how recent the post is. More recent posts will have a higher chance of being shown to your visitors. This is especially useful for blogs where posts are more news- and events-based, such as TechCrunch. It is more interesting to read posts that have been written in the past month rather than posts that have been written a few years ago on blogs such as these.

Anyways, please, PLEASE let me know how well this works for you. I have only tested this on a handful of blogs, and so far, it has worked great on them. But, if this plugin brings up posts on YOUR blog that are not popular at all, then do let me know! I’ll try my best to fix them ASAP.

So, I hope you enjoy this plugin!

History

• 07/07/15 – 1.0
  • plugin release