

Show HN: My weekend project - inspirational quotes - ConceitedCode
http://www.inspirationalquoteaday.com/?hn=1

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sramsay
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.

~~~
e3pi
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.

~~~
sramsay
I take it all back.

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marcuskaz
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

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poissonpie
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.

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cmb320
People still like motivational quotes? When I see someone tweet one I
immediately unfollow them.

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

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darkmatter33
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/>

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gruseom
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.

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pramodliv1
Nice design! Are the quotes input manually or taken from an api like twitter?

~~~
ConceitedCode
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.

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signed0
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.

~~~
ConceitedCode
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.

------
sramsay
Immediately put me in mind of this recent HN thread:

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

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shail
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?

~~~
ConceitedCode
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.

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ortonruk
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?

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

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

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jtheory
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....

~~~
Felix21
I think in general, when the quotes say MAN, it is used sort of as a short for
huMAN i.e, all of us.

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

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

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

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

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nuttendorfer
Please consider adding a RSS feed.

~~~
ConceitedCode
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!

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afshinmeh
LOL! Less than a minute, right?

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

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

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

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opensandwich
You might want to change your spelling of 'receive'

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

~~~
gansai
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.

~~~
PavlovsCat
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 ^^

?

~~~
gansai
This also sounds fine.

