perchance

For example, if you've made a world building religion generator, and you title it "The Arch Bible" or something like that (i.e. something that's more of a "brand" than a "description"), then people won't be able to use a web search engine to find it unless they already know its name. In other words, people don't search for "The Arch Bible" when they want to find a religion generator - they of course search something like "fantasy religion generator" or whatever - so make sure you put keywords like that in your $meta.title/$meta.description if you want to make it easy for others to find it.

Search engines heavily weight the page title in their search, so it definitely pays to have a $meta.title which appropriately summarizes what your generator does in a few words. It's fine to have something like "Fantasy Religion Generator - The Arch Bible" as your title - i.e. a description, plus a "brand". Just don't leave out the key descriptive terms.

I'm writing this post because I don't think people realize how the "popular" generators on Perchance actually tend to get popular - it's one of two things:

1. (rare & temporary) The generator happened to go viral on social media somehow.
2. (common & long-term) The generator's title and/or description was descriptive, and so random people around the world each day hit their page via a Google search, which can add up to thousands of visitors in just a few months if it's a popular "topic" that people search for.

Popular generators almost always get popular via #2, and #2 often eventually leads to #1 - i.e. people find it via a search engine, and then share it with their friends on social media, and then at some point (for whatever reason) it goes viral. I think people tend to incorrectly assume that #1 is the main factor in a generator's popularity (it can be, but it's rare).

TL;DR: Use appropriate descriptive terms in your title and description if you'd like your generator to become well known. Think about the sorts of keywords that people would type into a search engine to find your generator.

For images and other files that you need for your generators/plugins/etc. - rather than using base64 strings, or external file hosting services like catbox.moe

https://perchance.org/upload

Previously all generators shared the null.perchance.org subdomain, but now thanks to Cloudflare moving wildcard DNS from the enterprise plan to the free plan (announcement post) I've given each generator its own subdomain. I really should have done this a year ago when they announced it - just got around to it today.

I've added some code to transfer localStorage data across to the new subdomains, but unfortunately this code has to run the first time you visit any generator, and causes a refresh to happen a second or two after page load. This'll be a bit annoying, but I can remove this code after a few months - it's just to make sure that any important data is transferred across. If someone hasn't visited a particular generator in a few months, then the localStorage data (e.g. from the remember-plugin) probably isn't very important (and if it is, it's still recoverable - they'd just have to make a post here on the lemmy community to get help on how to do it).

If, for some reason, you need to easily & programmatically access the new subdomain, you can use the global generatorPublicId variable (akin to generatorName which already existed). The full URL of the embedded iframe is https://${generatorPublicId}.perchance.org/${generatorName}. The null versions of generator embed URLs are auto-redirected to the new generatorPublicId versions, so you can still embed your generator in other websites using the normal embed code:

<iframe src="https://null.perchance.org/my-generator-name" style="width:100%; height:600px; border:none;"></iframe>

That iframe will redirect to:

https://50e67e76966106ad99d72edb729943b7.perchance.org/my-generator-name

Please let me know if you run into any troubles with this, or have any feedback/suggestions .𖥔 ݁ ˖

Here's the subreddit announcement post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/perchance/comments/14z303f/the_perchance_community_is_moving_to_lemmy/