Easy, cheap, nice blog with a randomized tagline (non-negotiable)

September 19, 2021 6:28 PM

How can I make a site that has a tagline/subtitle that's randomized from a selection I provide? Ideally, the platform would be easy, cheap, and good-looking: a fairly minimal two-column blog would be aces. My soul demands a randomized tagline and damnit I'll learn how to host my own wordpress.org site if absolutely necessary, but perhaps there's an easier & less time-intensive way?

If there's a way to do this on wordpress.com, awesome! I don't know how to tell which widgets are allowed on which themes bar trial and error so please suggest away if you do.
I'm sure it's very doable with wordpress.org but I've forgotten everything I knew about hosting that except that it could be a bit of a pain and a lot of a timesink.

posted by Baethan to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Where do you want the tagline to appear? Just below the in-page title?

Simplest way is probably Javascript within the page itself. This will take care of in-page and maybe the title as well.

Put a placeholder piece as the tagline.

Put all the taglines in an array, pick one, and do a DOM manipulation and replace the placeholder with the picked result.
posted by kschang at 6:50 PM on September 19, 2021

I have a pal who made me a randomized quote generator thing for a page I have. You can see and copy that code here if you feel comfortable with viewing the source on that page.
posted by jessamyn at 7:24 PM on September 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

Here's a Wordpress plugin that presents randomized text. This goes in a widget, so you'd need a theme that puts widgets in a place where you'd want the quote to appear (they usually appear in the sidebar and/or footer, but some themes put widgets in the header too).
posted by adamrice at 6:47 AM on September 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

I'm fairly certain you can't do this on wordpress.com with the free or lower cost tiers. The business class tier is $25 a month and says you can install plugins, so the plugin dancing leaves mentions might be an option.
posted by kathrynm at 4:20 PM on September 20, 2021