YARQ! Quotes and Excerpts and Snippets, Oh My!

I like quotes and excerpts. I’m not a big fan of the signature quote in emails and forums — it becomes repetitive to see the same pearls of wit and wisdom over and over and over again — but in general I like a good quote and have collected quite a few over the years.

(Skip ahead past techie background info to read about the exciting new MovingToFreedom.org site feature…)

I’d been thinking lately about adding some kind of random quote feature here, and this weekend after writing a couple of posts I needed something to prevent me from doing other pressing tasks, so I started toying around with the idea. I considered a custom PHP feature, and although it would be a good learning exercise and fun for its own sake, it made a lot more sense to look around for a plugin first.

And I’m glad I did, because I found the “YARQ” plugin by Frank van den Brink. (Yet Another Random Quote.) Besides the great name (say “yarq” a few times; it’s catchy), it’s a nice little plugin. Frank has set up a Google Code page at http://code.google.com/p/yarq/. (Which is interesting in itself. I’ve used Google Code Search, but wasn’t familiar with their Project Hosting. It looks like you get SVN for source code control, a download manager, a wiki, and an issues tracker. Might be a nice, low overhead way to manage small projects.)

Anyway, YARQ is cool. It not only provided a good base for a random quote plugin (I made a few changes to customize it to my liking), it serves as a great example of how to make a plugin with hooks into the WordPress “Manage” and “Options” admin menus.

Frank made the plugin available as GPL v2 or later. I might redistribute it with my changes as v3 or later, but that would require more time than I have at the moment. (It takes so much more effort to write and document code to be used by other people!) Still, I love finding GPL v2/3 code, especially if it has the “or later” clause. Freedom! Share and share alike. I’ll be happy to share my meager changes, but again with the deferral. I have some ideas for future enhancements; we’ll see if they bubble up and demand to be included. (There is one change you might want to look at if you want to use YARQ — I entered it as an issue on the Google Code page, but I don’t think Frank is actively managing the project right now so not much may come of it. It has to do with special character formatting.)

Yet Another Random Quote

So, here’s what you get. On any given page, there’ll be a quote at the bottom of each sidebar. On the left, a standard YARQ. On the right: a YARRQ. Yet Another Random Rush Quote. (The band, not the big fat idiot.)

And! A page just for YARQs! Most pages on this site are cached by WP-Cache, so that for any given page you’d see the same quote for up to a half hour, but you can reload the YARQ page over and over to your heart’s content, getting a constant stream of wit, wisdom, and silliness to help you through this crazy journey of life.

I didn’t add all my collected quotes. The unfortunate thing about a lot of good quotes is that they get worn down from use. Still, I put in some of my timeworn favorites, like Mark Twain’s, “Thank God for the idiots, but for them the rest of us could not succeed,” and others that get overplayed these days in our march to dictatorship, like Ben Franklin’s quote about trading essential liberty for safety. I hope many of them will be new and enlightening to you. I’ll add more in time.

For the Rush quotes, I initially have stuff from the most recent albums. I’ll be gradually working backwards and putting in the older albums. Lots of great stuff there, although again, some of it has been around the block a few times. The past two albums’ lyrics (Vapor Trails and Snakes & Arrows) are often darker and less optimistic, and I like them as much as the older more hopeful stuff. Of course, it’s the lyrics + music that really makes it all work for me.

Say Your Say

Give it a try! You feed readers out there will have to come visit in person if you want to see. At the moment there are no ads on the YARQ page, so you can try it out sans commercial embellishments.

Please! Discuss the quotes, share your own favorite quotes (they don’t have to be deep or even make sense; mine often aren’t and don’t), and let me know if any problems.