Basically I'd like to display a random link to a website every blog entry. I've got a list of links that I want to use
but I can't think of anyway other than javascript to do it, and I don't want to use javascript as it'll slow down my site. I'm using .shtml pages.

I'd quite like to create a seperate category for links, then add entries with the various details of the links in it (So like the link in the extended entry, a long description in the regular entry, the title as the name of the link and the excerpt as the title of the link). This would mean my links page would be easily updateable and all and I could have a index of my links. But if I do this, how would I have a random link for every entry?

I could think of some great ways to do it from the MySQL backend with PHP, but I'm not sure if there's an easy SSI solution.

Maybe something with the entry-pool.dump idea that Ben has in this thread?  That could be used with SSI instead of PHP.  That probably is the best idea I've seen for your situation.

(this thead is the basis of how I would choose to do it myself - with php and mysql)

Kristine