Stubbleblog

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.

Updated Strongest Man with news and a product list. Also gave it a cleaner design.

I ended up doing a comparison of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft News searches in order to pull the Strong Man news. Yahoo’s results were terrible, 1/3 as many and lots that were totally irrelevant. Microsoft’s was more complete than Google but included some exact matches from the world of cycling that I didn’t want to deal with. So I went with Google.

Google News Search RSS feeds are horrible. The item descriptions contain Google specific HTML, the first tag being BR. It’s like somebody ran a split() on the actual News page.

Salesforce Article #2 officially pubs on Monday. This one is about how to turn your blog into a lead generating machine with the Salesforce API.

I did a quick design iteration on I Heart Quotes in order to make the Random Quote feature more prominent. Traffics up 25% as a result.

I’m working on a social networking project and bought two domains but can’t decide which to go with, crowdvine or membermojo. Sarah likes crowdvine because it’s more gender neutral, likes the growth visual, and the CV play on words. I like membermojo because it’s more fun to say. Any opinions?

I claimed all my sites in Google’s Webmaster tools. This gives you a bunch of stats on your site like what your rank is for various search terms.

Wired had a great writeup and explanation of Wesabe. Way better than I’ve ever managed to do.

Not a lot of updates to my personal projects lately. That’s because we’re very close to launching Wesabe. When? When it’s ready as Marc says. Luckily I had a bunch of unannounced stuff from way back. Here’s what changed:

Added the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue to I Heart Quotes. I found it on Archive.org and luckily it was in text format and easy to parse. Most of their books are in pdf or some other format that I don’t know how to parse, otherwise I’d be adding ancient medical terms and all sorts of other weird stuff.

Tagged all the quotes in I Heart Quotes. Now you can browse George Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein, and Comic Book Guy, among others.

Redesigned I Heart Quotes to accomodate all the new tags but hate how it turned out. Just read some design advice the other day along the lines of pick one thing that you want people to do on a page and make that twice as big as anything else. I think that one thing is clicking the random quote button. Going to give that a shot on the next design.

Added an IFRAME widget for quotes to the API page. Now you can put quotes on your website (like I did on my blog). People with fast and reliable servers build these widgets with Javascript. Unfortunately browsers pause page rendering until the javascript is downloaded and I wasn’t comfortable with that delay even on my own blog. IFRAMES don’t have that problem, so that’s what I’m using for now.

Twitter added RSS feeds which means you can subscribe to the iheartquotes RSS Feed of three quotes per day. Of course if you actually signed up for twitter you could get those same three quotes on your cell phone or GTalk account.

I’m starting a World’s Strongest Man fan site with my friend Adam White. So far I’ve just put up a bulletin board (PunBB) and there’s already 50 posts. I can’t wait until we add the Video. Adam was actually involved with the sport, I just like to watch people pull 747’s with their teeth.

It’s time for GemJack to get some more attention. It had stopped updating again, something I only noticed when I went to look for Blaine’s Jabber::Simple gem. Fixed two things that were stopping the update. We’ll see how that works.

My first Salesforce Article is in and set to publish next Tuesday. As I said in my Obvious Trends post, I’m really excited about trends that help engineers start small businesses. Salesforce is building development tools that are targeted right there.

Also we got a dog, Eggs. That was meant to be short for Eggs Benedict but he’s seeming more like a Scrambled Eggs. Got him used from Milo Foundation.

Make iheartquotes your Twitter friend and get quotes messaged to your phone every day at 10am, 3pm, and 8pm.

If you’re not ready for daily updates but find yourself alone with your cell phone jonesing for a quote you can also text iheartquotes to MOZES (66937).

This latest I Heart Quotes integration is a mashup of the I Heart Quotes API and the Twitter API. The Twitter API is new but there’s already been some cool uses, like update Twitter with your IChat status. I’m sure there will be more, because 1. Twitter is awesome, 2. the API is dead simple.

BTW, I Heart the quote that Biz dug up for his post about this on the Twitter blog.

Text iheartquotes to MOZES (66937) and you’ll get a random quote text-messaged back to you.

Mozes is a text messaging company that offers hosted keywords. They provide the text messaging service and the dedicated number. You provide the content. There’s a bunch of options for providing dynamic content using their API. At the easy end, which is what I did, you just need to provide a URL that responds with the content inside an XML packet.

The first keyword is free and you don’t actually need to be a programmer to use it. In fact the service seems to be mostly used by bands to provide tour information.

iheartquotes.com is a quote database that I built a few weeks ago so that I’d have better access to my favorite quotes (mostly drawn from the Unix fortune program). It as its own API so that you can add quotes to your programs or websites (I use it to get a random quote whenever I login and also to show a random quote on my website).

Introducing I Heart Quotes.

Unix used to have a lot of personality. RedHat would let you go through the entire installation in the language of ‘Redneck.’
And every server had a program called ‘fortune’ that would greet you with some manner of quote, joke, epigram, or other pithy comment. Things like this gave personality to an otherwise pretty nerdy hobby.

At some point the source of those quotes, the fortune program, stopped showing up on servers. A combination of Linux trying to compete in the corporate world and my leaving college to also compete in the corporate world led to working on servers with less personality. The fortune program still exists, but just isn’t as prevalent. I think that’s sad.

So what’s a man to do? Build a web service on top of every fortune file I could find on the internet (if you know of any that I missed, please email me). Now I (you) can get your fortune regardless of what’s installed on the server.

(I also built a digg-style website and ratings for the data, but that’s really beside the point.)

Here’s what I put in my .bash_profile to get a fortune every time I login:

alias getfortune='wget --timeout=3 -O - -q'
alias fortune='getfortune http://www.iheartquotes.com/api/v1/random'
alias myfortune='getfortune http://www.iheartquotes.com/api/v1/random?source=joel_on_software+paul_graham+prog_style
myfortune

If you’re on a Mac you probably have curl installed instead of wget. If so use this line:

alias getfortune='curl -m 3'

There’s more options on the official API page, the most important is that you can choose which sources the API pulls from (make sure you include Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons: simpsons_cbg). The available sources are below.

From geek:

esr
humorix_misc
humorix_stories
joel_on_software
macintosh
math
mav_flame
osp_rules
paul_graham
prog_style
subversion

From general:

codehappy
fortune
liberty
literature
misc
murphy
oneliners
riddles
rkba
shlomif
shlomif_fav
stephen_wright

From pop:

calvin
forrestgump
friends
futurama
holygrail
powerpuff
simon_garfunkel
simpsons_cbg
simpsons_chalkboard
simpsons_homer
simpsons_ralph
south_park
starwars
xfiles

From religious:

bible
contentions
osho

From scifi:

cryptonomicon
discworld
dune
hitchhiker