Hi all! I originally outlined a grand-unified vision for a quotes sharing site here:
http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/ideas/fortunes-mania/ This is a very nice vision, but also something that I found very intimidating to implement. So I didn't. :-) Instead, what I did was continue to add text fortunes to the collection of my fortune cookies: http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/fortunes/ Now, as I noted, one problem in this scheme, was that to refer someone to a certain fortune, I needed to give him the link to the plain text file and then say "search for Perl". Not good. And it was still a plaintext file that wasn't linked to the rest of the site. Now, anvari.org has put some fortunes (including mine) on http://www.anvari.org/fortune/ . He used an SQL database to store them as plaintext, and link to them. However, he doesn't have id's and the links are the first sentence. So I decided to: 1. Create an XML grammar for storing fortunes (with some extra meta-data like an ID, a title, etc.) 2. Convert the fortunes to this XML. 3. XMLise them a bit. 4. Publish them on my site as XHTML after using an XSLT stylesheet to convert them. So I started defining a very basic grammar, a rudimentary XSLT stylesheet and wrote a Perl script to convert them, and then added id="", title="", and more information. You can see the results in pages such as: * http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/fortunes/shlomif-fav.html * http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/fortunes/tinic.html And there are also the XMLs such as: http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/fortunes/shlomif-fav.xml (I didn't define an XSLT or CSS stylesheet for the XMLs for the time being, though it shouldn't be hard.) The XML grammar is still very limited - it only supports <irc> fortunes (for IRC conversation logs) or <raw> fortunes (for a gigantic <pre>). But it's a start - Rome wasn't built in a day, and Linux reportedly started as a non-glorified 386-only terminal emulator. You can find the code for the stylesheets here: http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/web-cpan/XML-Grammar-Fortune/trunk/ Note that at the moment, it segfaults on perl-5.10.0, due to this bug which I reported: http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=35781 Plans for the future include: 1. Define more types of fortunes - quotes, screenplays, etc. 2. Convert my existing fortunes to them. 3. Create a bridge to RSS/Atom to syndicate the new fortunes as news. 4. Add more meta-data for the fortunes. 5. Write a Perl module to translate the fortunes back to text. (Not sure if XSLT is up to the task.) ------------- In the future, this might end up as a more serious attempt to create a (structured - not free form), open, sharing and syndication site for quotes. Comments are welcome. Regards, Shlomi Fish ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ My Aphorisms - http://www.shlomifish.org/humour.html The bad thing about hardware is that it sometimes work and sometimes doesn't. The good thing about software is that it's consistent: it always does not work, and it always does not work in exactly the same way. _______________________________________________ Perl mailing list [email protected] http://perl.org.il/mailman/listinfo/perl
