Rotating Through Alphabetical List - In Order

Question

Maybe I haven't had enough coffee or I'm just tired from
getting up in the middle of the night for my 1 year old, teething
daughter, but I just can't seem to think of a simple way to rotate
through a list in order. Here's what I'm trying to do... I have an
alphabetical list of companies displayed on my site (advertisers).
The companies at the bottom of the list are getting annoyed that
they're always at the bottom. So, I want to make the list of
companies start at a new position each time (in order). So, it
would start outputting in this order: a-z, then coufput "b-z" /
cfoutput "a" (two cfoutputs), then "c-z" / "a-b", etc.. But, I
don't want it to start at a-z for each new visitor to the page, I
want it to remember the last display, say d-z / a-c and start with
e-z for the next visitor.
One of my ideas relate to saving a variable in the database
each time the page is viewed and doing a plus one to figure out the
starting position. And, when it gets to the total number of records
in the list starting back to 1. Isn't that too complicated. What am
I forgetting?
Hopefully, someone can help me. Maybe I'll go get another cup
of coffee and see if that helps....

Answer 1

Assuming your list of names comes from a db, there is another
approach. If your db supports it, get the minimum length of the
company name (trimmed of course) each time you run the query. Then
generate a random number between 1 and that value. Let's call it n.
Sort your query by the nth character. That should make it different
each time.