TheCWLZone Blog

This is documented in many other places on the Internet, but it can’t hurt to have too many tutorials.

You can jazz up your web site with a bit of JavaScript to randomly insert images on your page. I’m doing this on my masthead, as one example.

The first requirement is to build a list of images:

myPix = new Array("images/bridge.jpg", "images/butterfly1.jpg", "images/cats.jpg", "images/ducks.jpg", "images/field1.jpg", "images/field2.jpg", "images/flowers2.jpg", "images/flowers3.jpg", "images/flowers4.jpg"
                  );

Then write the code to select one at random:

imgCt = myPix.length;
function choosePic() {
  if(document.images) {
    randomNum = Math.floor((Math.random() * imgCt));
    document.myPic.src = myPix[randomNum];
  }
}

Finally, you need to set up the HTML to hold the image:

<img id='frontphoto' name='myPic' src='images/bg.gif' />

The name=’myPic’ relates to the JS “document.myPic.src” declaration. The id=’frontphoto’ definition in the <img> tag is the CSS magic that sizes the image. And the ‘images/bg.gif’ is a placeholder image that gets overwritten by the selected image.

That’s it – you can poke around the web site and watch it work.

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