Bonus Post: WordPress Trick #1

I figure since I asked you to read 2,000 words about my long-term planning today, the least I can do is give you a laugh at my expense and a WordPress trick you might not be aware of. Thanks, Diana, for the meme, and Luther, for the awesome conversation on Twitter that prompted her to dig it up. David, this is the post I promised you last time we talked about the technical side of WordPress. Join us all on Twitter, folks. It’s a laugh-a-minute over there on Saturday afternoons!

If you go and look at your WordPress account settings, you’ll see a checkbox right under the interface language that says “Surprise me (Fun mode).”

When you check that box and save the change, it enables a check-box in your dashboard called “This post is super-awesome.” You can find it right beneath your publicize settings and check it or not for individual posts as you see fit.

And what does it do, you ask?

I have no freakin’ clue. So far, the Internet has refused to yield that secret to me. Diana and I discovered it by accident. My two favorite theories are that it makes your post more likely to be seen by Freshly-Pressed editors and that it introduces some random bonus element into news feed placement. Both of those are speculation, though.  Diana tends to use it only for Part Time Monster’s best posts. I use it for just about everything.

We discovered it almost a year ago and I have yet to figure out what the point is, but it still counts as a WordPress trick. I’m assuming that whatever it does is entertaining at the very least, and I did get a trophy notification that included a Leetspeak reference once.

Notice how this is #1? That’s because I’m planning to do more of these once I get next year laid out and settle back in to the Sunday social media blogging for spring.

EDITED: And . . .  the Internet has yielded the secret. Or actually, All Thoughts Work yielded it 😉

In another recognition of the solitary nature of blogging, Mullenweg and Roth also wanted to celebrate the publishing efforts of the individual writer. Or, at least, allow the user to celebrate him or herself. So they added a “this post is super-awesome” button authors can check when particularly pleased with a specific post. And they’ve introduced video snippets of scenes replete with whooping, high fiving, slamdunking and general celebration that might play when someone hits the “publish” button. The Tiger Woods hole-in-one footage seemed off to me but there were some great clips. Randy Kennedy from the New York Times even filmed a little segment saying “from the world of publishing, congratulations on publishing.” I’d definitely smile if that played after I’d just sent my pearls of wisdom off into the ether.

From Businessweek.

One more reason to love blogging! Thank you very much, Anna!