A quick way to visit a random page on MDN
Maybe in the vein of Chris Coyier’s post on A /random Route on a WordPress Site,
I found myself kinda interested in being able to just go to a random page on MDN. I didn’t find an obvious existing feature for this, so I hacked one together.
It’s pretty simple — it fetches MDN’s sitemap, parses the XML, and grabs a random URL then redirects to it.
https://mdn-random.kkipp.workers.dev
I love Copilot for this kind of stuff. I had this thing built in less than 10 minutes. This Json2TS Raycast extension was also pretty helpful for generating TS interfaces for the parsed XML.
Here’s the complete code:
import xml2js from "xml2js";
export interface Env {}
interface Sitemap {
urlset: Urlset;
}
interface Urlset {
$: $;
url: UrlItem[];
}
interface $ {
xmlns: string;
}
interface UrlItem {
loc: string[];
lastmod: string[];
}
export default {
async fetch(
request: Request,
env: Env,
ctx: ExecutionContext,
): Promise<Response> {
const mdnSitemap = await fetch(
"https://developer.mozilla.org/sitemaps/en-us/sitemap.xml.gz",
);
// parse xml sitemap
const sitemapString =
await mdnSitemap.text();
const parsed =
await (xml2js.parseStringPromise(
sitemapString,
) as Promise<Sitemap>);
// pick a random url
const randomIndex = Math.floor(
Math.random() *
parsed.urlset.url.length,
);
const randomUrl =
parsed.urlset.url[randomIndex]
.loc[0];
// redirect to random url
return new Response(null, {
status: 302,
headers: {
Location: randomUrl,
},
});
},
};