Idea: a widget displaying randomly selected posts

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  helar · Member · Nov 30, 2009 at 4:48 pm

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  I would appreciate a new widget that would display several (say, up to 5) randomly selected posts from a blog. I have a number of topics on my blog that are “ageless” and it would help to keep discussions going.

  Anyone else feeling the same need?

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  thesacredpath · Member · Nov 30, 2009 at 6:10 pm

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  I expect that if wordpress introduced this type of thing it would be truly random. In other words, we would not be able to control which show up and which do not.

  My suggestion would be to simply make your own in this case using a text widget.

  http://en.support.wordpress.com/widgets/text-widget/
  http://en.support.wordpress.com/links/text-widget-links/

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  izaakmak · Member · Nov 30, 2009 at 7:48 pm

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  You can call up a random post by adding the ?random switch to the end of your blog’s url. I used this trick as part of “The QuickFix” text widget in my sidebar.

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  ismailimail · Member · Nov 30, 2009 at 8:21 pm

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  I use image widget to display random posts (it’s a manual work though).

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  babaliciou5 · Member · Dec 1, 2009 at 3:25 am

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  iNove theme has this feature when there’s no widget added — default. Interesting thing is, it displays 5 random posts on homepage’s sidebar while all we can manually do at best is to have a link – with or without image banner- (…/?random) to one random post of each click. I’m totally in tune with the OP, having multiple random posts displayed automatically on sidebar is a sound good idea.

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  raincoaster · Member · Dec 1, 2009 at 4:07 am

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  I used to have this as a clickable button like ismailimail has, and when I got rid of it I got complaints.

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  helar · Member · Dec 1, 2009 at 3:19 pm

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  Thanks to all of you! I tried the ?random switch attached to a picture and (after some minor challenges) IT WORKS! Happy, happy, happy… You are great!