Two summers ago I put up IHeartQuotes.com, a personal project to see what kind of site I could develop in two work days. It’s a quote rating site and the quotes are all taken from Unix fortune files. The break down of work was 8 hours to find an available domain name, 2 hours to build a site in Rails, and 6 hours of CSS wrangling. A little while after launching it I hooked it up to Twitter, where it’s currently the 96th most followed account. (follow iheartquotes on twitter)

I haven’t given it much thought since, other than that I now enjoy quotes through Twitter three times per day and again every time I log into a Unix shell. I logged in to the Twitter account for the first time in at least a year and was surprised to see people talking back to IHeartQuotes, except that they don’t seem to realize that it’s a robot.

I literally have no idea what quotes are going to be spit out. I didn’t collect the quotes and I don’t do any filtering other than programatically checking that the quote matches the Twitter message length. Sometimes the quotes aren’t even quotes, and sometimes they’re really uncalled for. For example, this one shocked me:

“You will be divorced within a year.”

Here were some of the angry responses:
“What a horrible thing to say! I think I might have to stop following this crap.”
“Growing tired of @iheartquotes’ dumb and unfunny sayings. How lame.”

Sorry! It’s a robot!

But now that I remember my password again I’m tempted to post the occasional quote or message directly. For example I just posted a pointer to my friend @mlevel, who posts birth and death date quotes every day.

So that’s the history and future of iheartquotes in case anyone was interested.