Selecting Random News Stories

Hello everyone.

I am trying to put together a "news area" for my website.

Basically, I want to have a bank of 20 news stories, but I would like to display just the headlines of 5 of them within this news area.

My problem is that I would like the 5 stories to be selected at random.

Does anyone have a bit of code, or a link to an article that would do this?

I'd prefer to so this as simply as possible, and ideally without using a database.

Thanks for your time.

IGD

You could do this with ASP or Javascript. Let's say you have 20 news titles. Create an array with 20 titles. Then add your titles to the array:

Dim Array1
Array1(0) = "Title of news 1";
Array1(1) = "Title of news 2";
...and so on...

Then loop 5 times to display the news titles:

For i = 1 to 5
Randomize ' Initialize random-number generator.
x = Int((20 * Rnd) + 1) ' Generate random value between 1 and 20.
Response.write( Array1(x) )
Next

Of course, you'll have to add some code to ensure that you don't display the same title twice.