This is the 1,000th post to “Through the Interface” – a milestone I mentioned was coming up a few weeks ago. Which means I’m hitting about 142 posts per year, which is pretty much on target (I aim for 3 posts a week, so that’s about right).
Something that occurred to me, over the weekend, is that it’s often not very easy to discover content contained in the blog: there’s search (which usually seems to work well, but even I have trouble finding posts I’m sure I’ve written, from time to time) and the post indices (“Post Index” and “Reverse Index” in the left-sash, as well as category- and month-based indices in the right-sash), but I thought it was time to try something different.
I’ve therefore added the “10 Random Posts” section in the right-sash, which picks out and displays a set of random posts from the blog’s content archive every time a page is loaded. This was surprisingly tricky to implement using TypePad: I had to jump through some hoops to generate the information I needed for the various posts and ended up storing hard-coded information on the first 999 posts in the sash itself (anything from 1000 onwards gets added to this list dynamically, so future posts will also be included).
This hopefully won’t impact the blog’s load times too badly: right now it’s an extra 140K of data that needs to be loaded – which doesn’t seem as though it would cause a problem, particularly – but I’m certainly open to switching it off, in case people start to complain (legitimately :-).
Give it a try and let me know if you find it helpful: the tooltip for each link contains the date the post was published, to help you decide whether it’s worth clicking on, or not.
