Heydon has been working on Ga11ery, a neat image portfolio site generator that's ideal for webcomics. But it's built on the Jamstack using 11ty and Netlify, which means it isn't so simple to implement a "random image" button. However, because static site generators start with a collection/array of elements to make into pages during build time, you can use the array's index to effectively mock previous/next pages (something I'd like to do here, actually).
Introduce a little bit of Math.random and you have a decent random link, but it's still generated at build time, so every user gets the same random pathway (and you can get loops). Heydon uses some client-side JS to install a second level of randomisation to get around that. It's a clever little trick and, as he says, is likely more performant than the traditional PHP/API query method:
Build-rendered beats server-rendered beats client-rendered.
