Happy International RNG Day!

xkcd comic 221 with code: int getRandomNumber() { return 4; // chosen by fair dice roll. guaranteed to be random. }

My favourite RNG comic from XKCD

The day is celebrated on a random day each year and last year’s roll landed us on this beautiful summer Friday. International RNG Day is a celebration of random number generation:

We often need numbers that are Random, for everything from games to encryption. RNG Day is an opportunity to learn more about Random Number Generation, and to have fun with it!

I wanted to celebrate it this year with a new feature on my website: a random blog post picker (or RBPP amongst friends).

When building in randomness into a static site, it’s important to be aware of when the randomness roll is performed.

If you build randomness into your templates or build step, you’ll generate a new outcome every build. Sometimes, this might be what you want and especially if you have automatic nightly builds for the site, it might work really well: every day the readers get a new random pick.

In my case however, I only build the site when I make changes: either I add new functionality (or fix old ones…) or I publish new or updated blog posts. This means that a build-time roll could be the same for a week or so between updates and that’s not a very fun or useful for our random blog post picker.

My code for the page at /random is as follows:

---
layout: layouts/page.njk
title: Random blog post
description: A random post from the hundreds published on my blog
---

<article>
  <h1>{{ title }}</h1>
  <noscript>
    You need Javascript to spin the random generator. You can manually pick
    something to read from <a href="/blog">blog index</a>.
  </noscript>

  <p>
    This page will redirect to a random blog post from my blog in 5 seconds.
  </p>
  
  <script id="blog-posts" type="application/json">
    [
      {% for post in collections.posts %}"{{ post.url }}"{% if not loop.last %},{% endif %}{% endfor %}
    ]
  </script>

  <script>
    const posts = JSON.parse(document.querySelector("#blog-posts").textContent);
    const random = posts[Math.floor(Math.random() * posts.length)];

    setTimeout(() => {
      window.location = `${window.location.origin}${random}`;
    }, 5000);
  </script>
</article>

First, I have my frontmatter for the page. Then, I added a noscript tag to notify users who don’t have Javascript enabled that they can’t rely on this feature and must pick manually from the blog index.

In the first script block, I dump all the urls of my posts into a JSON array so my client-side Javascript can access them.

Then, in the second block I parse that array into JSON and pick a random post. I then add a 5 second wait with setTimeout before directing the user into the new page.