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Hi there, I am pretty new to webdesign. My friends and I are working on setting up a writing website. We currently use invision free boards for our roleplaying and writing space. We want to build a homepage that we can link to the boards.

We'd like to have a box with which pulls a random posts from one of the boards. But it is beyond my understanding how to do this.

Currently we are hosted by topcities, but are looking at purchasing a domain soon.

Is there a simply code that can be used. We will most likely be using a lot of CSS in our design, we are all pretty new to webpage design beyond simple HTML.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I think you should possibly reconsider doing this. Although picking a random post should be easy in theory, most boards number their posts in the order they were created, so if a post is deleted it no longer exists. This would mkae it substantially more difficult to find a post that existed.

Also bear in mind that threads tend to flow and sometimes posts cannot be understood out of a thread.

I was also unaware that there was a free version of Invisiion board? If you aren't knowledgeable with PHP yourself, someone here would have to write a script and we couldn't do that without the existing software.

We wouldn't be deleting any of the posts, rather it would be a post of the day sort of thing, with a redirect to that board for those that wanted to read more.

I'm sure we could just pull a few posts a week and pop them into a randomizer or something like that, but we really wanted it to be a bit easier and less time consuming by just pulling up a random post from one of the boards and popping it onto our homepage.

We are using boards at invisionfree.com.

Thanks for the reply.

Since Invision free is a service, (I'm assuming) you don't have access to any of the programming of the board, or the SQL. In order to grab a random post, you would at least need your own hosting and would need to write a particularly complicated script that gathers the text visually.

It would be much easier to setup your own board and then program a random post script as well, but since you're new to webdesign, it would be quite difficult to learn an entire programming language as well as how to set this all up.

Without learning more, I can't see how you can do this!

That's pretty much what I was afraid of. We can go with another design and just put up links to the boards we use. Just thought it would be cool to pull the posts over there for the look.

Thanks for the answer.