# Random
> Markdown version of https://brajeshwar.com/random/
{%- comment -%}
/random/ — sends the reader to a random post.
SELF-CONTAINED, on purpose (Brajeshwar, 2026-07-27: "A standalone
independent module that I can carry with my website and not worry about
CloudFlare or others."). It is one page plus one small script. No Worker, no
KV, no build service, nothing outside this repo.
WHY THE INDEX IS INLINE HERE RATHER THAN A FILE TO FETCH
The obvious design is a JSON index somewhere under /assets/ that a script
fetches. That would be a bug waiting to happen: /assets/* is served
`cache-control: max-age=31536000`, so the index would freeze for a YEAR and
posts written after it would silently never appear in the pool. Nothing
would look broken — the button would keep working, just never offering
anything new. Hashing the filename fixes that but then the script has to
learn the hashed name, which means the name has to come from the HTML
anyway.
This page IS the only thing that needs the index, so the index lives in it.
The HTML is `max-age=600`, so it refreshes on its own and a new post is in
the pool within ten minutes of a deploy. One less moving part, one less
cache to reason about, and no extra request: the reader is already loading
this page.
It costs ~62 KB raw / ~23 KB gzipped, paid ONLY by someone who clicked
Random. Measured against the alternatives, packing the URLs more cleverly
(dropping the slashes, grouping by year) saves about 1.5 KB gzipped — gzip
already eats the repetition — and costs JS that reassembles URLs, so plain
full URLs it is.
`|` as the separator, not a newline: one character, and no whitespace-control
gymnastics in the Liquid loop to stop every line arriving indented. A URL
cannot contain a bare `|`.
WITHOUT JAVASCRIPT this page still works (guardrail 4). It renders a real
link to a post picked at BUILD time, and because the site rebuilds on a
daily cron that pick rotates every day on its own. Deliberately NOT a
: an automatic redirect with no JS to replace the
history entry traps the back button, and this page is reached by choice — it
can afford to state what it is.
{%- endcomment -%}
{%- comment -%}
The build-time pick. Liquid has no random filter and this repo takes no new
plugins (guardrail 3), so the build timestamp is the seed: seconds since the
epoch, modulo the number of posts. Deterministic per build — which is what
makes it testable — and different on every build.
{%- endcomment -%}
{%- assign seed = site.time | date: '%s' -%}
{%- assign pick_index = seed | modulo: site.posts.size -%}
{%- assign pick = site.posts[pick_index] -%}