"weirdbro" is absolutely right. Since the ran_num variable is being used within the document.write function itself, there's no reason to put if blocks around it. The single document.write section would always be executed, just with whichever variable number you come out with. If you're truly concerned about formatting each story differently, you should have separate css styles created and then track those with another array or some other solution - you shouldn't be formatting with HTML.
I copied the code down and tried it out with a single document.write and it works fine - refreshing randomly changes the content. Note that I had to change the double quotes - the ones that came down when I copied and pasted were invalid and I had to make them regular double quotes. Here's what my code ultimately looked like:
<!--
var title=new Array();
title[0]="The First Story";
title[1]="The Second Story";
title[2]="The Third Story";
var ran_pic=new Array()
ran_pic[0]="images/1.jpg"
ran_pic[1]="images/2.jpg"
ran_pic[2]="images/3.jpg"
var story=new Array()
story[0]="Well, here's the first story. If I wanna use HTML code that's fine, but make sure the quotations are just apostrophes since we already opened
quotes, Javascript will get confused.For Ex: <a href='another.html'target='_blank'>Another Page</a>";
story[1]="This is the second story."
story[2]="And this is the third."
var ran_num=Math.floor(Math.random()*3)
document.write('
'+title[ran_num]+'<br><table border="0" cellpadding="3"cellspacing="0"><tr><td><img src="'+ ran_pic[ran_num]+'"
border="0"></td><tdvalign="top" class="w">'+story[ran_num]+'</td></tr></table>')
-->
Last, but not least - if you're really serious about doing something like this, you should consider feeding it from a database or XML file instead of hard coding arrays into your .js. Granted, that's additional work but is more maintenance friendly and is better form.
