Randomuser.Me – Like Lorem Ipsum, But For People
When you’re creating a mockup site there is one thing that is common to each and every one of them: Lorem Ipsum. Even if you are a blogger, you have probably seen this while choosing your template. It is a text filler, pretending to be the awesome content you will write one day. When you’re creating user profiles, or filling in user registration databases with random data for testing, you need fake names, headshots of the right size, and more- basically, you need Randomuser.Me.
Generating Users
RandomUser is an API that provides you with a randomly generated user. These users can be used as placeholders in web mockups, and will save you time from creating your own placeholder information. You can use AJAX or another method to ask RandomUser for a randomly generated user. If you are using JQuery, you can paste a code provided on the page to your body to get started. The application will provide you with a JSON object that you can parse and apply to your application.
Currently on a 0.3.2 version you are provided with usernames, salts, SHA-256 hash, registration date, and DoB. It gives you a couple of ways to control the results that the system outputs. You can request a specific gender using the “gender” GET parameter and removing it returns to a random value. In order to speed up your application, the page allows you to request the same information each time from the service. This ensures consistency, at the same time allowing your browser to cache profile photos and speed up your loading time. Randomuser.Me also accepts a “seed” parameter that will always return to the same results.
However, note that the seed parameter will override the gender parameter.
Lorem Ipsum Help-um
Although all of this can seem like a technical mumbo-jumbo to somebody who isn’t coding, almost everybody will at one point in their life need a mock-up site and API-s like this are extremely helpful. Unlike random text that you can simply copy-paste if you are sick of lorem ipsum, random users need more work. This way you can save a lot of time and material. All photos are copyrighted under Creative Commons license and all were hand picked from Greg Peverill-Conti’s 1,000 faces project.
In a world where you need to be present online, sometimes you’ll have a short amount of time to come up with your online identity. Randomuser.me helps you a lot in that area. It will save you time and give you a couple ways to control the results that the system outputs. So don’t be shy to experiment with coding!
