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Wordpress.com blogs you have Tag and subscribed Blog surfing features with which you can surf your subscribed blogs, and get the update information from the blogs. You can also have the list of Blog of The Day in here http://botd.wordpress.com/ . There seems to be no random blog surfing, and blog hopping and just hovering over different blogs in wordpress.com at this time. Earlier WordPress.com had a Next Blog link on the admin bar on the top, when you are logged in into your wordpress.com account, (http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2006/02/08/blogs-where-to-next/). But it was removed. But although the link was taken out, the feature is still there. This post will describe how to re-enable the Next Blog feature, and let you visit blogs randomly .

Random wordpress.com Blog

[tweetmeme source=”phoxis”]

The secret is the “next/” link. What you need to get a next wordpress.com blog is simply append “next/” (obviously without the quotes) after your blog, or any blog address. For example to get a random blog you need to append “next/” tag to my blog link, or any wordpress.com blog like below:

https://phoxis.org/next/
http://wordpress.com/next/
http://yourblog.wordpress.com/next/

Note that you need to append a forward slash at the end, and thus https://phoxis.org/next won’t work. A forward-slash ‘/’ should follow the “next”.

To avoid typing and appending next/ every time, you can bookmark any of the link shown above in your web browser. Whenever you click the bookmark you will get a new blog. Simply drag and drop the following link to your bookmark bar of your browser : Next Blog

Random Posts Within a Blog

Yet another feature, which is already there, is random posts within a certain blog. This can be achieved by appending the “?random” string after any blog URL. For example to get a random post from my blog you need to enter

https://phoxis.org/?random

You can do this from the admin bar of your blog also when you are logged in. Take the most cursor over the “Blog Info” link on the admin bar and the click on the first link “Random Post” and there you are. This feature was introduced as an wordpress.com easter egg. (http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2007/04/26/get-random/)

Although the next blog feature starts to repeat the same blogs after some time. But is definitely a good feature for surfing blogs easily, hosted in wordpress.com. This also helps the small blogs to get some attention. It would be great if wordpress.com reintroduces this feature again. So start wordpress.com blogsurfing and visit the Next Blog

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8 thoughts on “Re-Enable WordPress.com random blog surfing

  1. Hello there,
    I think new bloggers in the wordpress.com community will like this post as I think they are likely to use the “next blog” browse link. As for me, I used the “next blog” button years ago when I was bored but haven’t used it since and can’t say that I miss having it at all. I also have a random post link on my About page but I see no evidence of readers using it there. It used to be in my sidebar where I had linked it to an image but I didn’t see any evidence of it being used so I moved it. I think the better place of the two to position a random post link for readers is probably in the sidebar. Thanks for providing what we need to know in your post.

    1. Hey, thanks for stopping by my blog.
      I was curious about the next/ link which was blocked by the blog robots.txt (which i saw from google webmaster tools). So i punched in the link, and discovered this. Searching in the wordpress.com blog reviled an old post documenting this. I used the “Next Blog” link pretty often when it was there in the admin bar, although it was not that much an excellent feature, but it definitely was a very good feature. You can discover good blogs hiding in corners of wordpress.com with this feature.
      The probability of visiting the about page is low, and clicking on a link in the about page is lower. But every page has the sidebar, and so placing a link on the sidebar gets the probability of clicking on the link higher. So i agree that a good place to place the random blog post link is the side bar. But probably it is not a good idea to place a “Next Blog” link in your side bar and get the reader out :P

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