I checked out my site over on Alexa the other day, and it turns out that my blog has a traffic rank of 1,469,067. Although this doesn’t seem much, it means a lot to me as I’ve climbed up a few million since my site was moved over from “alanunleashed.com” at the start of this year, which doesn’t even have a recorded traffic rank.

My blog started out as a small site that served as an outlet for my thoughts, bust has grown into something much more than that. My blog is getting quite big, both traffic wise and content wise. A quick look at Mint tells me I get around 50 unique hits per day on my blog, and also interestingly on labs. I only hope this number will increase in the future, as I add more and more stuff to this site.

For now though, getting under the 1.5 million mark is a big achievement for me in itself.

I was watching some clips of the Web 2.0 Expo on blip.tv, and I came across Matt Mullenweg’s speech on WordPress, and what he would like to see in the future of blogging. He pointed out that when you post, especially on WordPress.com, when people read your post all they have is the comments section, and possibly a chronological backwards/forwards post link, but that’s basically it for the reader. If they want to find out more on that given subject, they would have to search for the content.

On this blog it’s pretty much the same, you read the normally extremely short posts, and are left disappointed either with the quality of how i’ve explained things, or the fact that you want to read more about that given subject from another blog. I know I have comments, but they are hardly busy at the best of times (i think the average around here is about 0 comments per post). Also a recent addition is the “Possibly Related” section below each post, which I had to go through every damn post on here and tag to get working. But, I don’t usually write other posts expanding on posts prior to them, so they usually don’t help the reader at all.

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I am seriously sick to death of the fucking retards that can’t write blog posts from their own minds, so instead copy other people’s and make the content look like their own.

You know, the kind of dicks that prey on people’s personal blogs, like this one, and copy the content leaving little evidence of the original author. I’ve never taken this approach to blogging, and every single post on this blog has been formulated from my head; from my creativity. I think that the minority of bloggers have completely missed the point of blogging altogether, and assumed that hey, it’s on the internet, why not just copy it?

For example, this site is relatively small. Just take a look at my Mint installation and you will see that I get around 30-40 unique visitors a day. So, what I don’t need is people taking my content, and posting it on their website.

But, that is exactly what has happened with my “Installing and Configuring Lampp” post, which has proved my most popular post, but has also proved the most prone to copying. Why the fuck you would do that I don’t know, but the fact that people do copy pisses me off beyond belief.

So, if you’re not clever enough to write your own blog posts, and instead prey on other people’s websites, I don’t think blogging is right for you, eh?

I didn’t realise that upgrading WordPress would break the pretty random redirect plugin that I modified, but it was brought to my attention today that it did. So, I set about trying to fix it.

The solution I came up with was to create a page with the permalink “/random/”, so that I could apply a page template to it.

Grab my page template: Source, ZIP. Upload it to your active theme directory.

Now you need to create a page called Random. You can fill it with any text you want, because no-one will see it anyway.

At the bottom of the WordPress edit page panel, under Advanced Options, select the random redirect page template.

You now have a fully functional /random/ page that will redirect you to a random post on your site when someone visits it, and the page will show up on any page lists you have on your theme, meaning you don’t have to manually add the link.

Now wasn’t that easy?

I logged into my Development blog to find that there was a new version of WordPress, as my main blog hadn’t noticed. I jumped over to the WordPress site only to find an unfamiliar new design, which is completely and utterly awesome.

When I installed the update I couldn’t believe how different the administration panel looks - it’s so fresh! It nearly makes me feel a little guilty about my very dark blog theme. Being the casual blogger that I am I love the new administration layout and the new swing of things, even if there were some minor issues with the new uploader under Apache 2 that could be sorted with a few lines in the htaccess file.

Warning: This method doesn’t work with WordPress 2.5. I’ve written a more recent post that makes it work with WordPress 2.5 using a page template.

Matt Mullenweg created a plugin called Random Rediret last year, which enables you to visit http://www.example.com/?random, and for you to be redirected to a random post from that website. I love the plugin, as you can see the “random post” link above.

But.. I like all of the links on my blog to work with “pretty URLs”, hell I even have my search feature working with that. Call it obsessive, but I just feel that the ?random link breaks the swing of things somewhat, so i’ve modified the plugin to work with a http://www.example.com/random/ link instead.

It’s worth nothing that although it does make the random URL a pretty one, it will break any pages that you have called random.

Grab the source: http://download.alanedwardes.com/pretty-random-redirect/random-redirect.php

Grab the normal PHP file in a zip: http://download.alanedwardes.com/pretty-random-redirect/random-redirect.zip

It’s such a minor update to such a small plugin I thought there would be no point in branding it under my own name and attributing Matt, so I’ve left the meta aspects of the plugin in tact. It just looks like the normal Random Redirect plugin, and I won’t be uploading it to the WordPress plugin database.