Posted December 2024

Keystroke to Go to Random Web Page

Most pages on THE LAB have event listeners set up so that if you press Alt + R you will be taken to a random page on the site. This is a fun way to explore the site. It's a simple bit of JavaScript that listens for the keydown event, and if the Alt key and the R key are pressed, it will take you to a random page.

I created this for my site "Smorgasborg" which is a kind of "junk drawer" offshoot from my personal site.

Large websites can be cumbersome to explore, particularly sites with a lot of pages.

It's also useful for me to spot-check changes to a website as a hidden feature.

JavaScript Code to listen for keystrokes

document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function () {
    document.addEventListener('keydown', function(event) {
        console.log(event);
        if (event.altKey && event.keyCode === 82) {
            // if we are in frames, go to the top
            if (window.top !== window.self) {
                window.top.location = '/random.php';
            }
            window.location = '/random.php';
        }
    });
});

PHP Code inside random.php

<?php

require_once '../loader.php';

$directories = glob('*', GLOB_ONLYDIR);

$urls = [];
$urls[] = '/';

// for a small filesystem based site this is okay,
// but for a larger site you'd want to cache the
// list of directories
foreach ($directories as $directory) {
    $just_slug = $directory;
    // My convention is to have a directory with the same name as the slug
    // Directories without that convention would be ignored,
    // To implement this you could also check for index.html or index.php.
    // Whatever indicates to the script what a valid page would be
    $file = "$directory/$just_slug.php";
    if (file_exists($file)) {
        $urls[] = "/$just_slug/";
    }
}

$link = rand(0, count($urls) - 1);
$url = $urls[$link];

// We want to be able to run this from the command line
if (php_sapi_name() != 'cli') {
    header('Location: ' . $url);
} else {
    echo $url . "\n";
}