The return of “It is written”
You may have noticed that the random quotes are popping up again on the sidebar, though this implementation is different from the one I used in MT: it’s written in PHP — and not much of it, being only about 800 bytes, half of which is comment — and it pulls a new item from the file every time the page is loaded. (This, incidentally, should theoretically tell you if you’re getting a cached page, since it’s not likely you’d pull the same item twice in a row.)
The author of Witty Text says:
This is probably the simplest WordPress plugin there is in existence. I could be wrong, of course. This simple plugin will fetch a random quote from a text file and display it pretty much anywhere on your WordPress site.
It is remarkably uncomplicated, which is why it’s here. Most competing plugins and/or widgets want to build a database with quotes, authors, and whathaveyou; this one asks only for a text file, and as it happens, I had a 125k text file at hand. (It’s now grown to nearly 130k.)
Someone who remembers the old BBS days asked me if I still had my old tagline file from when I was running BlueWave. I did and do. It was in fact 152K, which means it contains more items than my current quotes file, and what’s more, taglines in those days were limited to a mere 74 characters.
Old BW taglines I probably should add to the current file:
- If Bill Gates = you then let Length_Of_Pier < Your_Walk
- “Chief O’Brien, beam @FN@* into deep space, wide dispersion.”
- what’sthebigkeyatthebottomfor?
- All my .BATs are in D:\BELFRY.
That last, incidentally, was true until 2006, when I bought a new desktop and didn’t bother to repartition the drive.
* Inserts First Name of person being replied to. I have no idea how to implement that.
