On July 26, 2008 Stoyan Stefanov published his seminal blog post location=location which listed 535 ways to refresh a page using JavaScript. At the time I was just learning how to JavaScript (by hacking about with the at-the-time flagship Prototype JS) and legitimately used this page as a resource when I needed to learn how to trigger a full-page refresh.

In a fit of whiskey-fueled madness I thought (as any sane person would) "Why not bundle all 535 of these into one object and build a script that will pick one at random when a refresh is needed?"

And here we are. To be clear: this is the worst thing anyone's ever made. Nobody in their right mind should use this in their project.

That said, if you really really really want to, here's how!

First off, you need to include freshmaker.js into your page (maybe someday I'll put this up as a bower package or something equally time-wasting). Any time you need to trigger a page refresh just call _fm(); and Bob's your uncle.

Freshmaker has no dependencies other than possibly your own lack of self-respect and a stiff drink. Well, ok it's not going to work in browsers that don't do ECMAScript 5 because it makes use of Object.keys but if you're still coding for IE 8, I mean, you've got bigger issues to deal with than not being able to use this stupid thing.

If you're curious to know which one of the 535 options is being used on any given refresh, just pass a number as an argument to the function. It will delay for that many seconds and log the function being used to the console! I know! _fm(5); will wait for 5 seconds before firing and console.log() the refresh method being used. Any argument passed that's not a number is ignored.