I heard that comment again today.... "I wish the Random Node button would exclude all those boring empty home nodes." How many of us have clicked the Random Node button a few times, only to tire after clicking-through one too many unattended homenodes?
I wrote a quick CGI that will do this clicking-through for
you. It will grab up to five random nodes and send you
off to the first non-homenode it finds. This should keep you from landing on the most desolate of nodes.
Its just a quick hack and I do know how to HTML::Parse, and LWP::UserAgent so keep that in mind.
Here is the code running under mod_perl/mason:
<%INIT>
use LWP::Simple;
my $maxcount = 5;
my $referer = $r->header_in( 'Referer' );
my ($www,$tld) = $referer =~ /(www\.)?perlmonks\.(\w+)/i;
$tld ||= 'org';
my ($count,$title,$author,$node,$html);
while ($title eq $author) {
last if $count++ >= $maxcount;
$html = get("http://perlmonks.com/index.pl?op=randomnode");
($node) = $html =~ /\blastnode_id=(\d+)/;
($title) = $html =~ /<title>([^>]+)<\/title>/i;
($author) = $html =~ /\bby\s*<A HREF[^>]+>([^<]+)<\/A>/i;
}
my $redirurl = "http://${www}perlmonks.$tld/index.pl?node_id=$node";
$m->comp('/comps/redirect.cmp', url=>$redirurl);
</%INIT>
Feel free to take the code and run with it, or go to your user settings and Add
<A HREF="http://perlmonks.thepen.com/scripts/randomnode.pl">Random NonHome Node</A>
to your personal nodelet.
-Blake
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