Random weblog homepages

January 6, 2002 9:11 AM

I have Mefi set as my Home Page on IE but sometimes I wish I could just randomly have a different weblog (or website for that matter) each time I start the browser from a list I can specify (perhaps using a section in 'favourites' or a file on my hard disk). Is this possible? Anyone want to take a crack at it?
posted by feelinglistless to General Weblog-Related at 9:11 AM (10 comments total)

If you're not running a local webserver, you might want to look into these hosted scripts. I don't know anything about them other than that they appeared in a Google search, so they may all suck.

Having a local webserver would make this even easier, because you can just whip up a script to prowl through the links in a section of the bookmarks file or whatever the IE equivalent is and redirect at random.
posted by majick at 9:52 AM on January 6, 2002

Sounds like a good opportunity to learn some Javascript, feelinglistless. Why not have a crack at it yourself.
posted by dlewis at 10:13 AM on January 6, 2002

The Javascript function in this thread sounds flexible and easy to implement.
posted by waxpancake at 11:10 AM on January 6, 2002

couldn't you just make a webpage that redirects to a randomly chosen page from a list you've made when you load it up, then save it to your hard drive and set that as your startup page?
posted by lotsofno at 6:11 PM on January 6, 2002

or as an option, make a page on your C: drive your homepage with all your favorites on the page. Only one more click.
posted by bjgeiger at 8:57 PM on January 6, 2002

Randomly chosen from here would be cool.

*cough*pony*cough*
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:51 PM on January 6, 2002

Okay, stavros, I'm working on it. Automating the scraping of link data took me longer than I wanted it to, but there ought to be a random redirector in an hour or two if I get some time to code it.
posted by majick at 9:43 PM on January 8, 2002

Alrighty then. If you'd like a randomly chosen link from the MeFi user list, you could do worse than the little ditty I whipped together and put up at http://skunkworks.cx/randomuser/

There are bum links in there. People make bum links, there's not much I can do about it. I've tried have it tidy up a bit while converting the nice clean HTML database dump into a parsable format, but I can provide no guarantees.

Enjoy your pony.

By the way, I'm impacting mathowie to the tune of a 750K data dump to update this thing -- so it'll only refresh the list once a day (at 01:13 PST). There're 4915 links in my end of the database, so I doubt the update pace will get noticed.

mathowie: some kind of Last-modified: header hack on links.mefi would help, considering its weight?
posted by majick at 10:49 PM on January 8, 2002

Oh, and another bit if you're more of a multibrowsing sort of person.
posted by majick at 12:08 AM on January 9, 2002

majick -- that's really, really good ...

Just wondering though, how easy would it be to modify the code at work here to look at a text file in some webspace or on a hard disk which contains a list of URLs and pick one from there? This would really solve my initial riddle...
posted by feelinglistless at 4:30 PM on January 9, 2002