Life, the Universe, and Lani

Update: as of today, 19th of November, 2014, Random Post is no longer an option.

My favorite WordPress feature is the Random Post option. It’s the equivalent of flipping through a book and landing your finger on a page to find a quote you like or today’s meaning of life.

Or closing your eyes and choosing something out of your closet (Egats! Never!). Or fanning out a deck of cards and blindly picking one.

I wonder if anyone else uses theirs. I use mine regularly. The reason being is I’m sort of new to WP, but I’m not new to blogging. I’ve been blogging consistently since 2009 and I started off on blogger.

Although prior to 2009, blogger or blogspot.com hadn’t worked out the kinks yet, so it was a frustrating platform to work with. In fact, I quit using it because of all the formatting problems. When I returned, it was because blogger had vastly improved. I still have one of my blogs there.

A colleague convinced me to move my Thailand blog over to a paid WP site which I did for about a year. But the hosting company turned out to be one of my biggest regrets. I started encountering problems and despite a “money back guarantee,” I never got my money back.

So that turned me away from paying for a vanity web address and hosting. I wrote about my big blogging mistakes here. But then my best friend was having good success with his WP.com site, so I switched my blog over. This leads me to Random Post.

Even though I had gone through all of my previous posts (and at this point I have almost 400) after the move, I still find mistakes and formatting problems. I also started off by not putting pictures in my posts and now I usually have at least one. So, the Random Post feature allows me to “pick out a card,” “choose a dress” and “flip to a page” with the ease of a click.

Not only can I fix any problems or make adjustments, I can look back into my archives, like I would a diary entry, and see where I was at in my expat story. I also use it to post old content on Twitter. And even if I hadn’t changed blogging platforms, I’ve changed themes, and with each theme change comes its own tweaking as well.

But I stop myself from deleting posts I don’t like or making drastic changes. Maybe I will in the future, but for now I like the Random Post option and I wish WP.com would develop a Random Post button for readers because I think it’s a nice and quick way to get a sample of what your favorite bloggers have done before you found them 🙂 (*Although if you are on WP.com you can go to the top left corner and see Random Posts of other WP.com bloggers)

Do you use Random Post? What’s your favorite WP.com feature?