The random photos are back. I wrote a quick hack to loop over every photo in every album and read its relevant info into a MySQL table. Now instead of taking a few seconds to get a random photo using the Gallery data stores, it uses a single query and takes a millisecond. Long-time visitors to the site remember that the random image in the corner has always been one of my favorite things about this site, but as the photolog grew to a thousand, two thousand, and then nine thousand images it slowed down more and more. I had to start caching it so it would change once every 15 seconds, then every minute, then every 5 minutes, and then I just manually rotated it for a while. Finally I put the random image out of its misery.

Now it’s fully dynamic, every page you view is completely unique, just like you.

(There goes my bandwidth.)