As the creator of Silicon Wisdom, yes, it is going through a quote file, but no, it's not strictly alphabetical. Large sections are, but there are also large sections of thematically related quotes as well.
--Sean Conner Sat, 06 Sep 2008 05:47:25 -0400
Ah -- yeah, I was doing some research on Unix "quote" -- assume it's the same database split?
I wish I could find out more about the contributors to the "canonical" files, it's all pretty clever, and lots doesn't appear elsewhere...
--Kirk Sat, 06 Sep 2008 09:41:26 -0400
Good work on that btw!
--Kirk Sat, 06 Sep 2008 09:41:50 -0400
Actually, I came across a quote file from a BBS and wrote my own "fortune" program (the quote file wasn't in the proper format). My program also handled the case when you added a new quote to the file by automatically reindexing it. Over time I added support for RFC865.
I'm using that file as the basis for Silicon Wisdom. I filtered the "master quote file" and removed any quote longer than 140 characters, cleaned what remained up (using HTML entities) and used Perl to post a new entry and schedule the next update (using the Unix command "at") at some random point in the future.
And thank you.
--Sean Conner Sat, 06 Sep 2008 18:29:10 -0400