News

07/26/2015

It's alive!! I've resurrected the Randomizer after decommissioning it nearly six years ago! It looks a little dated and the stats are all out of whack, but it still works... :)

06/06/2009

Created a Twitter account for automatically tweeting new pages.

04/26/2009

Added two new categories, 'Travel and Maps' and 'Money and Finance'.

10/07/2007

Fixed an annoyng bug that caused the "remember me" checkbox not to work. Also added some protection against spam-bots posting garbage into the feedback forms.

03/31/2007

The Randomizer has been upgraded from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0! Big deal, you say? Maybe so, but it is the first site update in six months.

09/09/2006

Page-blocking is now fully functional. If you ever see a page you don't like, simply block it, so you'll never have to look at it again!

• Pages can be blocked by clicking "Block Page" from the Randomizer Panel, as well as from the "page info" (comments page).
• You can easily unblock a page, by simply deleting it from your block list.

09/03/2006

I changed the look of the main page and also added a bookmarklet feature to allow you to add pages to your account from anywhere on the web - no need to sign into the Randomizer!

08/25/2006

I apologize if the site has been unavailable in the past few days, but I've finally got around to upgrading the hardware.

After more than 12 hours of fiddling around, I've finally managed to upgrade the web server from a 500MHz Celeron with 256mb RAM to a Pentium III 1.0Ghz, 512 Mb RAM system. If you ever need to migrate your Windows installation to different hardware, check this out - it really works!

07/30/2006

Some updates! I removed the pointless banner advertisements, added some new features and fixed a few minor irritations.

• Removed the banner advertisements.
• Removed the "Redirect Delay" from the user preferences. With the introduction of the "work-safe" filter, it seemed a little pointless.
• Added a feature that will send an email to users when one of their pages changes category. For example, when a page is first categorized. Currently, this feature will send email if the page owner has entered their email address. In the future, I will make an "opt-out" feature available in the user preferences to customize the reciept of various emails. However, I just wanted to get it working, so for now it will send an email if the page-owner has entered their email address - to opt out of these emails, users can delete their email address in the user preferences page.
• I also modified the "5 newest pages" feature to display the words "private page" instead of the URL when a user added a page that was marked as private. However, this looked terrible when there were more than 2 "private page" entries in the list, so I removed it again. Please make your pages public, unless you have a GOOD reason not to!

28/02/2006

I haven't spent much time on the Randomizer recently - I've been too busy with the Timelapse Project. Check it out, it's quite interesting!

11/12/2005

Added an feed, showing the newest pages added to the Randomizer.

11/11/2005

Finally got around to adding the "lost password" feature, as well as several other minor improvements.

• New users now have the option of picking public sites at registration time, rather than having to modify their profile after they log in.
• The randomizing link in My Start Page is now clickable.
• Cleaned up the statistics charts
• Lots of other little tiny things - can you spot them all? ;)

10/30/2005

Added a page ranking system. You can rank pages from 1 (awful) to 5 (awesome).

Who knows, someday the randomizer might use the page rank to determine which pages to give you...

10/08/2005

Updated the FAQ, the front page and "My Start Page". Added a status indicator and tooltips to the page category in "My Pages" list.

10/02/2005

Fixed a few minor bugs and added a new "Randomize Again" option to the randomizer frame. Not much time for major updates recently, and I have so many great ideas for the site ;)

09/18/2005

 Watch for the bombs! Pages that are not "work safe" are flagged with bomb icons - you have been warned! Access your profile to enable/disable the work-safe filter.

The work-safe filter is enabled by default. You can access your profile to explicity disable it, for an individual workstation. This means that you can use the Randomizer at work, with the filter enabled, and at home with it disabled.

The Work-Safe filter can be enabled or disabled for each workstation you use. You must have cookies enabled in order to disable the filter. If you delete your cookies, the worksafe filter will be re-activated.

Don't forget to report any pages that are incorrectly categorized!

09/15/2005

More messing around with the layout, and I think I've finally fixed it - at least for IE and Firefox. Also, I added a new global statistics page and removed the annoying popup window, replacing it with a frame instead.

08/26/2005

Added the option to have an additional popup window appear during randomization, to allow users to quickly add comments, report bad pages or block individual pages.

The popup window can be controlled through your profile settings. When a new random page is requested, the popup window can appear to allow you to quickly perfor the following operations:

• Add comments about the page
• Block the page so that you will not see it again. (Coming soon, the ability to view your block list and unblock pages from it)
• Report a page that is incorrectly categorized, broken or otherwise invalid.

Please note that the popup window will not work if you have pop-up blocking software installed on your computer. If you wish to use this feature, you must add random.miszou.com to your "allow" list.

08/25/2005

Increased password security and fixed a few minor problems.

• Password security has been greatly increased.
• Fixed an IE bug that caused pages not to be added to your list under certain conditions.
• Modified some more styles to try and make things work on at least IE and Firefox.
• Quote of the day is now cached on my server instead of making constant trips to BrainyQuote for the same information.

08/24/2005

Added a "Quote of the Day" feature to the front page and I'm still playing around with the style sheets for the different browsers.

07/31/2005

Added a link on the "page comments" page to allow users to report inappropriate or incorrectly categorized pages

07/17/2005

Added some basic page statistics, available afer you login. See which pages are most popular!

It's been a few months since I last did any major development on the site, so I thought it was time to start adding some new features - starting with the page statistics.

You can see all the pages that you have been redirected to in the last day, week or month. Or, you can simply view a complete history of every page you've ever been sent to!

4/24/2005

Pages are now grouped into categories. You can decide (in your profile) what types of public sites you want to see.

• New pages are "uncategorized" and will NOT be served to other users until they have been checked and categorized by an administrator
• You can choose what site categories you're interested in - and filter out the dull stuff. Check the FAQ and your profile for details
• Enhanced security and peace of mind for users that like the surprise of visiting public pages.
• If you previously accepted public pages, you are now subscribed to ALL categories. If you previously did NOT accept public pages you are not subscribed to any categories. This is effectively the same setting as before.

4/20/2005

Added the feedback page and a quick link to a random page.

4/16/2005

Several minor changes and improvements today. I've been in and out of it all day, but haven't had time to really concentrate on anything, so I just fixed a few small things here and there.

• Fixed a bug in the FAQ that prevented the items from expanding when they were clicked. Actually, this was a bug in the server configuration, because it wasn't set to allow downloading of JavaScript files, so the script to expand the items didn't download
• Added a small stats counter to show the number of pages currently in the database
• Enhanced the News feature, so all news can now be read on one page
• Cleaned up the database and deleted a lot of broken links. I'm going to add a feature to allow users to report broken/bad links, so hopefully this shouldn't happen too often

4/14/2005

Finally got around to starting the FAQ. I'll add more items as questions arise.

4/12/2005

Today I created this nice news feature, rather than work on something useful like the FAQ, page blocking, page ranking or enhanced statistics. It looks good, don't you think?

4/11/2005

Added an option to insert a delay before redirecting to a random page. This gives you a chance to cancel the page if you don't like the look of the URL.

4/10/2005

Launched the new Start Page Randomizer! The site has been completely rewritten, moved to a new server and given its own domain name. Watch this space for new features and updates to the Randomizer.