For the longest time I’ve kept a list of quotes in some form or another, and I think I’m safe in saying that a majority of us carry with us a collection of quotes that we think of when times are good or bad. When we need inspiration, we look to the adages of the great thinkers of the past. When we need a laugh, we look to one-liners from some of the great comedians. Quotes are like icing for the cake of life.
As of about a year and a half ago, I had started keeping my quotes online as a subfolder of this blog. At some point, they reached a critical mass and it prompted me to write a perl application to manage and categorize them better, and that when Quoth was born.
Quoth was a bit bulky and sharp at the corners, but it did its job quite well. I had even keyed it to allow for multiple contributors, but only those for whom I specifically created accounts. This program worked for a long while, until I had a glimpse of WikiQuote. I thought, “Wow! They are browsable in both categories and by author!” and so I made a grave mistake and converted Quoth over into a MediaWiki-driven site. Stupid, R.B.!
About a month after I did this conversion I realized my folly, but by then it was too late and the damage was done. It wasn’t until I got deeply involved in PHP programming that I found my quote salvation. Though PHP may have an extremely large collection of functions in the default namespace to start, it does make web application programming look very clean (I learned this while hacking WordPress). With this newfound cleanliness of code I found in PHP, I set out to rewrite Quoth in a more elegant and concise manner, cutting through the crufty code and letting it do its job well.
Initially, only I and a few manually-added others could contribute quotes to the new-and-improved PHP-driven Quoth. This would all change when I learned of the coolness that is del.icio.us. Del.icio.us had tags! I had always struggled with how to categorize and organize my quotes—fighting with my hierarchies. Del.icio.us’s taggable structure of N-dimensional organization was perfect. Within a few days I retrofitted Quoth to use tags (and partially mimicked del.icio.us’s interface until I find a better way to present the data) and I felt freer without the feeling that I was pushing jello into ice-cube trays anymore.
A few months later (i.e. a few days ago), I got around to enabling automatic account-creation (like del.icio.us) and I’m going to let it grow. Anyone can join! With time, I hope to implement more features, as I have outlined on the about section of Quoth.
Cool work.
I added it to my Bloglines account so I should get to see whenever you add new quotes.
If you are interested there are a few other quote feeds I subscribe too.
http://www.quotationspage.com/data/qotd.rss
http://www.brainyquote.com/link/quotefu.rss
and then somewhat related: word of the day
http://dictionary.reference.com/wordoftheday/wotd.rss
-Nathan
PHP is great :)
Care to elaborate on why using MediaWiki was a bad move? Or should that be obvious? :-)
MediaWiki is good at what it does: managing wikis with a huge number of pages and contributors. It has features I’ve never seen in other wikis, like watchlists and discussion pages. Due to the nature of the Wikipedia, things like this come in handy sometimes (like during an edit war). Since it is a complicated program, its setup and customization is lengthy and its code is scattered through way more than just a handful or two of code.
Beyond a certain utility threshold, its numerous features become burdens. For my modest needs as a low-low-traffic almost-personal wiki, I fell so far below that threshold that it almost hurt me to think about the overhead involved in MediaWiki’s operation. And as for a mechanism for storing quotes, a wiki is not the answer for someone with data OCD.
That little elegance and simplicity warning light was going off in my head on a daily basis after the novelty had worn off. Using MediaWiki was painful for me, that’s why I switched to WikkiTikkiTavi.
Ah, thank you. I can imagine that having a fullblown MediaWiki for quotes might be, uh, overkill. I’m still kind of leering at a more basic Wiki for notes and lists and stuff though, and WikkiTikkiTavi (what is it with geeks and cutesy names?) has been added to the tools to check out.