Matt's Blog

For those of you who use Matt Mullenweg‘s Random Redirect Plugin, this post will be useful for you.

If you’re not familiar with the Plugin, it will redirect you to a random post when you visit /?random.

I was searching Google with the top search terms to my Blog, and I noticed that for one of them, Google had the URL of the result as http://mattsblog.ca/
?random. Which isn’t exactly going to be helpful, since the person who clicks on that result is probably not going to get the same Post that Google had gotten when they crawled the page.

So, how do you prevent this from happening? Simple, you tell bots not to index /?random. You can just add this to your robots.txt file:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /?random

That’ll tell all the Bots that crawl your site (or, at least, the ones that follow the robots.txt standard) not to index /?random. Or, if you don’t want to do that, you can just add the following to your link for the Random Redirect:

rel="nofollow"

Now, hopefully those links to http://mattsblog.ca/?random will disappear out of search engines fairly quickly. 😀

Oh, and by the way, you can get a Random Post by clicking here.

If you use WordPress, you have probably wondered if you can display your Top 10 Most Popular Posts before. Well, you can do just that by installing a Plugin that will record the number of hits an Article has. Then, uploading a simple PHP file that you can download for free.

The Plugin is WP-PostViews. The Plugin is free and is released under the GNU General Public License. So, simply install that Plugin by downloading it, extracting it and uploading it to /wp-content/plugins/.

Now this is where my script comes in. Okay, it isn’t totally my script. It’s a modified version of the Script BlueFur released for this same purpose. Except, I cleaned it up a bit and made it so it used WordPress functions, so it’s more “WP-Friendly” you could say. So, you can download my script here. The script is licensed under the GNU General Public License. Now, all you have to do is download that file (or copy and paste it into a new file) and name it something like topposts.php, or anything really, as long as it ends in .php, and not .txt. You may need to change the following lines, depending on where your WordPress installation is installed and where you put the script:

require_once('wp-config.php');
require_once('wp-includes/wp-db.php');

Then, upload the script. If you don’t want it to be a Top 10, you can change the value of $limit to something like 5 to have a Top 5.

You can see my Top 10 Posts here.

Get it? Got it? Good.

Enjoy. 😀