Random button

| Blogs etc.

Just for the heck of it, I decided to stick a so-called random button on this blog to give folks a chance to jump around this blog in a more precarious and unexpected way.

If you look closely, you will see the bluish button on the right margin, and placed randomly (note the meta pun) all over the place. The button looks like this:

So how does it work? you might be wondering. Well for those Perl gurus out there it is nothing more than a simple script which scans a given directory, grabs a random HTML-file from the listing and does a good old redirect via the HTTP-header.

Of course, in order for this little code snippet to work, you have to have CGI enabled on your web server, e.g. included as part of your subscription.

Confused? Then here is a little code which I hope helps you folks out:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#
#  rand_redirect.pl
#
# Redirect for MovableType where a user will be sent
# to a random blog entry, category or whatever the
# HTML-file is present in the archive directory.
#
use strict;

my $dir = "archives";
my $rootdir = "/Blogger";

use CGI;

my $q = new CGI;

if (opendir(DX, $dir))
{
  my @allfiles = sort grep { $_ ne '.' and $_ ne '..'
      and ($_ =~ /\.html$/i) } readdir DX;
  closedir DX;
  my $num = (@allfiles);
  if ($num > 0)
  {
    my $n = rand($num);
    my $fname = $allfiles[$n];
    print $q->redirect("$rootdir/$dir/$fname");
  }
}

The last step is the easiest. Decide where on the page you want the button to appear, and just add the following code there:

<input type="button" value="Random"
  onclick="document.location='/cgi-bin/rand_redirect.pl'">

Hope this little code snippet helps someone out there whenever and however that may ever be. Please tell me what you think.

Random entries

Here are some random entries that you might be interested in:

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Golf Handicap

Information

This personal weblog was started way back on July 21, 2001 which means that it is 7-21-2001 old.

So far this blog contains no less than 2498 entries and as many as 1877 comments.

Important events

Graduated from Stanford 6-5-1979 ago.

Kiffin Rockwell was shot down and killed 9-23-1916 ago.

Believe it or not but I am 10-11-1957 young.

First met Thea in Balestrand, Norway 6-14-1980 ago.

Began well-balanced and healthy life style 1-8-2013 ago.

My father passed away 10-20-2000 ago.

My mother passed away 3-27-2018 ago.

Started Gishtech 04-25-2016 ago.