Tim Roberts

One of the things I’ve been thinking about more since starting at O’Reilly is how to draw attention to Tim Roberts a back catalog of content. For a single blogger, it’s pretty easy to link back to a relevant old post because of the information retrieval processor built into our heads. But for a site managed by an editor who may not be as familiar with the back catalog, the older content will languish, accessible only by search engines.

Then the other day I discovered the most amazing thing. I was freshening up the layout of O’Reilly’s Mac DevCenter, and we decided it would be cool to have a randomly populated book sidebar. Which meant I needed to pull records out of our database in random order—not something I’d ever needed to do before. It turns out that Tim Roberts the SQL needed to do this is astoundingly simple: