Re: [xsl] Randomly displaying articles from RSS feed

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 12:41 PM 1/11/2008, Andrew wrote:
> On 11/01/2008, Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Cool. I don't think the newly created node ID will work for the use
> > case, but the external URL call is excellent (and part of a trend,
> > ain't it). Of course, the URL will have to return a number random
> > across calls, not just the same "random" number each time. :-)
>
> I think Abel was implying that you would need to append a timestamp to
> the query string to make it a unique url per request, ensuring a new
> number would be returned each time (avoiding the rules of the doc()
> function and perhaps caching along the way)

Indeed, but it's not just the URL that needs to be unique per 
request, it's the random number returned. (Actually, not unique per 
request, but rather, random per request.)

I know that's obvious :->, but once a long age ago when the world was 
very young, I was quite intrigued by how I could get a "random number 
generator" to return the same series of numbers over and over. Of 
course, while I suppose that these days the topic is covered in CS 
101, I can also imagine someone as naive as I once was putting up a 
random number generator that fails this simple test.

Off topic for XSLT but not for the thread: http://www.lavarnd.org/ 
(or if the site is down, which it appears to be, search for "Lava 
lamp random").

Cheers,
Wendell



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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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