Blog Customization is Scary

2008-02-06

I recently wanted to customize my new Cutline theme to display a random header image with every page load. I noticed that the image was static based on the template. I went into the code and what did I see?
<br /> if page == type1<br /> render image 1<br /> if page == type2<br /> render image 2<br />

That’s paraphrased but the gist of it, not great but pretty average PHP in my experience. So I googled to see how to load randomly instead and I found blog postings by people that have created CSS hacks, use a remote call to a random number generator, and other insane ideas. It’s amazing the lengths people go to when they don’t actually understand the capabilities offered by a system. See The Daily WTF for daily examples of such insanity.

Here’s what I came up with:

Crazy, I know.