For many many months now, the random link at the top of this page just below the banner hasn't been working. I decided to fix it once and for all.
First of all I redefined the link to refer to a new CGI script mt_random.pl which I wrote myself using good old Perl. Here is how the new link is defined:
<a href="/cgi-bin/mt_random.pl?blog_id=1" title="Jump to a completely random place on this blog...">Random</a>
Of course the whole random magic of the situation is the Perl script mt_random.pl itself, which looks like this:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use DBI;
use CGI;
use strict;
my $q = new CGI;
my $format_url = "http://www.kiffinsblog.com/archives/%d/%0.2d/%s.html";
my $hostname = 'localhost';
my $database_name = 'db_name';
my $user = 'db_usr';
my $password = 'db_password';
my $dsn = "dbi:mysql:database=$database_name;host=$hostname";
my $blog_id = $q->param('blog_id') || 1;
my $dbh = DBI->connect($dsn, $user, $password) or die "Can't connect to $dsn: $DBI::errstr";
my $sql = <<EOF;
SELECT
entry_basename,
entry_title,
date_format( entry_created_on, '%Y' ) AS entry_year,
date_format( entry_created_on, '%m' ) AS entry_month
FROM
mt_entry,
mt_author
WHERE
entry_blog_id = $blog_id
AND
entry_status = 2
AND
author_id = entry_author_id
ORDER BY rand( )
LIMIT 1
EOF
my $sth = $dbh->prepare($sql);
$sth->execute();
my $ref = $sth->fetchrow_hashref;
print $q->redirect(sprintf($format_url, $ref->{entry_year}, $ref->{entry_month}, $ref->{entry_basename}));
You can now try it out yourself by clicking on the link above, and if you cannot find it then clicking here.
Pretty amazingly magical don't you think?
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