Show HN: My weekend project - inspirational quotes | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My weekend project - inspirational quotes

inspirationalquoteaday.com

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Taken out of context, most "inspirational quotes" seems to me to be startlingly vapid.

1. "Be the change you want to see in the world."

How? This might just mean, "It's up to you to change the world," (a questionable assumption), but this actually says to "be change." What the hell does that mean?

2. "The real leader has no need to lead -- he is content to point the way."

Leaving aside the fact that Henry Miller is a questionable authority on this subject, one might wonder what leadership would actually look like if the leader actually did nothing but "point the way."

3. "A leader is a dealer in hope."

Let's hope the CEO doesn't come in Monday morning with this one.

4. "To do great things is difficult; but to command great things is more difficult."

Why?

I could go on (and on and on).

I don't mean, of course, to impugn the authority of Napoleon, Gandhi, Nietzsche, or Miller (maybe Miller in this case). But I do think little micro-quotes from these thinkers are not simply poor substitutes for their writings, but distillations of those writings into near nothingness.

There are writers who are very aphoristic, but damn few of them. Most set their clever phrases within a much wider web of contemplation and argument. The person who mistakes one thing for the other is likely succumbing to the illusion that they are learning something.

1. "Be the change you want to see in the world."

Q: What the hell does that mean?

A: Objects and Methods evolve onto the onomatopoeiac holotrope. For example, holomorphic functions' identity of change: "I am that whose rate of change is myself", or more familiar: d/dt e^t gets e^t. Read YC Hacker News daily to know the fomenting currents of today's market transactions, so to effectively code what you are able; into what is desired and therefore become successful.

I take it all back.

Nice, I like the design.

I have a similar app which if you want more quotes I've collected a few dozen, a JSON list of them available here http://quotaculous.appspot.com/a/quotaculous.json

I create the app http://quotaculous.appspot.com/ to be a screen in Safari top sites so whenever I create a new tab I will see it

Nicely done! Shameless plug for my own random thought a day with pseudo-random flickr image background: http://penny-for-your-thoughts.appspot.com/ also has an api if anyone wants to use it.

People still like motivational quotes? When I see someone tweet one I immediately unfollow them.

I like pages like this. Here is a another one http://bigquote.co/

There was a site that did this with the quotes on top of a nice picture. Would love to see you automate the quote collecting, the old site eventually stopped getting updates.

old site: http://www.inspiremyday.com/

Most inspirational quotes, including some (if not most) of these, are bogus in the sense that they've been falsely attributed to the famous person. Your site would be better than the rest if you tracked down sources and dropped the bogus ones.

Nice design! Are the quotes input manually or taken from an api like twitter?

Manually at the moment, but I am starting the process of putting in a few hundred and automating the publishing for the future.

I'm actually thinking about opening up an API for other people to use to get a quote a day, but I'm not sure if there is a demand for that.

Are the listed quotes an example of what the user should expect to see if they sign up for the mailing list, or are they today's quotes?

If it is a "quote a day" service I would expect to see just one quote.

The list of quotes gets an additional quote added to it every day and shows all quotes that have been sent/posted so far. It is the same quote that is emailed, posted on twitter and facebook.

Immediately put me in mind of this recent HN thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5232643

I like the project. Its simple and clean.

Just one thing which may be a bit off-topic too. What if you receive a quote in the morning and you tend to not agree to it?

Unfortunately, not everyone will agree with every quote that is sent out. I'll try to do my best to accommodate as many people as I can and gladly will take into consideration any feedback. You can get an idea of the kind of quotes that will be sent out by what is listed on the site already. That being said, if you are not happy with the quotes that you receive there is an unsubscribe link in every email.

Hey, nice idea for a weekend project :)

Perhaps you could add server-side validation for the signup if you're looking for ways to improve it?

I submitted my email but it says it is invalid email... I checked the spelling and everything.. My email was entered correctly.

Sorry about that. I just pushed a change that should fix that. It might take a couple minutes to propagate.

I'm not sure of the best solution to this problem, but these quotes (and a lot of famous inspirational quotes, I suppose) are very clearly "men-only".

They refer directly to "men", or "man", use masculine pronouns only, etc..

Do you need a different stream for women? Or even optionally tweak the gendered words on the fly?

I'm not sure if this was just a random sampling, but it really struck me, just scanning down the list on the front page....

I think in general, when the quotes say MAN, it is used sort of as a short for huMAN i.e, all of us.

Still, I feel like I'm playing Bioshock, reading those quotes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J47ENHSomc8

Or even optionally tweak the gendered words on the fly?

"That's not how quotes work." - Mary Magdalene.

Of course not, but... a service is what you make of it.

If I want to be inspired, I might not also want to simultaneously be reminded that, historically, a lot of folks didn't even really THINK that women might ALSO be doing historical stuff, because blah de blah blah.

So I wouldn't be opposed to tinkering with the quotes, as long as that weren't done invisibly.

The first thought that comes to mind is giving the option to flip all gendered quotes, none, or at random. If you flip the gendered words of a quote, also flip the gender of the person (Alberta Einstein?) so that we're not pretending Albert actually said that word-for-word.

Caveat: I've never subscribed to a quote-a-day thingy of any kind anyway (and have not subscribed to this one), so...

Bug report - I see a flash of a green box saying "Almost done, need to confirm email address" on page load.

Agree. I saw that also.

Thanks for letting me know. I'll take care of this right away.

Please consider adding a RSS feed.

I knew I was forgetting something. Just added an RSS feed. Thanks!

http://feeds.feedburner.com/inspirationalquoteaday/wAuk

On a side note, Django made this incredibly easy!

LOL! Less than a minute, right?

Yup. Took longer to deploy and set up feedburner than to add the code.

upvote. It could be more fun if you make it open-source on Github.

I don't want anymore email. Maybe you can SMS me instead?

You might want to change your spelling of 'receive'

Well that's embarrassing. Thanks for letting me know.

Hi, You may move this button 'Sign up to receive a quote a day!' elsewhere. Currently, the center of attention goes to this green button. But, make this button look small, atleast. Just like you have this floating array of buttons for sharing, you can create a floating button just for Signing up. This way, the initial attention to this website is on the first inspirational quote, rather than on the Sign Up button.This way, any inspirational seeker is driven from the beginning. Hope you understand. These are my suggestions. Anyways, a nice, clean design.

How about this order:

1. header 2. the first (current?) quote, with slightly bigger text than the rest, or something else to set it apart 3. the sign up button 4. the rest of the quotes 5. footer, naturally ^^

This also sounds fine.

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