nice post making a page that offers tools to find random content on specific sites seems like a fun idea, maybe as a starting point for an even larger project
Thanks! Yes it does. Let me know if you have any ideas : )
Graphically it should suggest the experience of wandering the stacks of a large library. Have you been in the stacks of a big University or city library? Narrow, ill-lit aisles, books shelved on both sides, from the floor to well above your head. Oooh! Oooh! you could model it after Terry Pratchett's Unseen University Library[1].
This article reminds me of the one truly explorative news aggregate app I used some years ago called Zite.
Zite would not only pull news from the usual major sources, but it would also pull up obscure blogs and micro niche indie publications on the topic. It was my first time discovering blogs in their original form (not as posts on tumblr). Zite let my discover so much aggregate information from sources that only someone with a pre-existing niche interest would know about. A mudslide in a small Italian village where no one was harmed, but a boulder rolled itself into a villa's sitting room. A tiny Lutheran blog explaining the latin origins of St. Patrick with cited footnotes. A modern explorer's article on the greatest used bookstores they have found around the world (it was not a listicle). The intellectual stimulus was greatly missed once Zite was purchased by Flipboard and all of those nuggets from the vastness of the internet were overruled by the loudest and largest news publications.
Another place where randomization is useful is webcomics. I’ve gone through most of xkcd by just hitting the “Random” button, even tough I would never have the patience to sit through the comics one by one and keep track of how far I’d gotten.
Would using ArchiveBinge ( https://archivebinge.com/ ), which feeds you n comics per day using RSS, work for that use-case?
It’s sad, but I don’t actually have RSS software on my computer anymore. In any case I would flip through xkcd to waste time, not so I could stay up-to-date (I have a Slack bot that posts new comics regularly, funnily enough).
Would using ArchiveBinge ( https://archivebinge.com/ ), which feeds you n comics per day using RSS, work for that use-case?
It’s sad, but I don’t actually have RSS software on my computer anymore. In any case I would flip through xkcd to waste time, not so I could stay up-to-date (I have a Slack bot that posts new comics regularly, funnily enough).