Sellsius’ idea for a blog post surfing tool was made a reality by our friends at Blogging Systems. Use the Surfer like a remote control to view blog posts. Just click and surf your blog. It’s FREE and our gift to the Wordpress blogging community. Now your archive posts can be brought back to life. The blog surfer is currently set-up to produce random posts but it will be adapted in the future to allow specialized surfing by category, recent posts, or your big wave posts. Suggest ideas to make it even better.
We hope the surfer keeps readers on your blog to discover its hidden wonders. So wax up and ride the wave. Kowabunga dudes!
Download the Wordpress Plugin here for your own blog:
blog-surfer1.zip
Update: If you add the blog surfer to your blog, please let us know as we’d love to surf your archives.
BlogSurfer is up and running on the Phoenix Real Estate Guy!
I like it…
I did have to resize the GIF as it was too large as downloaded and made my left sidebar kind of goofy.
Surf’s Up Dude!
I have no idea if this is even technically feasible, but it’d be wicked cool if BlogSurfer could open a new browser window with a random post from my blogroll…
Shouldn’t it be in YOUR sidebar?
jay - the blog surfer looks great on your blog! anythings possible. your suggestion has been noted. thanks for the feedback jay
So its only usable if you are using wordpress?
For now Christine but it should have wider application soon.
Good idea and great execution! It’s particularly useful when you have a couple hundred articles in your archive too.
We realized that the existing system for accessing blog archives is basically useless. No one searches by month or day. In fact, how many actually even search blog archives?
We tried the Film Loop as a visual archive and then a Table of Contents (to mimic a book), which we could not keep updating. (We still like the Table of Contents idea) But the blog surfer is more fun. Being guys, we naturally liked the remote control aspect. Once it can be targeted to search specific categories & tags within your blog, it will be a lot cooler. Are we turning blogs into televisions?
Blog Surfer is up on Tucson Real Estate in The News.
It works great. I look forward to the enhancements mentioned in comments.
Thanks for what you do for those of us new to the Real Estate Blogging community. You were the very first ones to link to our blog, and like ones first kiss we will never forget the graciousness of that link.
You are most welcome David. Good luck with your blog. The surfer will hopefully increase your page views—we’ve already noticed an increase.
Your first kiss analogy is priceless.
Can this be installed on the free version of Wordpress blogs?
Yes, I think so Maggie. If you have any trouble, let us know.
Yes, thank you, instructions may be different for the free version of Wordpress. I’ll contact you when you return from Inman. I watched your walkthru this morning, you guys are amazing!
I tried adding through Sidebar Widgets but it’s hidden and is pulling an Error 404. It’s late so I’ll play with it more tomorrow.
It may be the size Jonathan. Try using the smaller one.
is it only for worldpress?
Is this tool compatible with Drupal? Thank you.
Yes, it works with Drupal.
Very useful plugin. I recommend it. Thanks for sharing.
I couldn’t agree more. Great article man!
My only real problem with google analytics is that it doesn’t work very well with a lot of ASP pages, which a lot of clients use nowadays. It can also get kind of hairy when trying to get it to understand what a conversion is. Instead of just any click, it needs to be one specific click haha.