What is this?

Have you ever wondered how you get the login messages when you log into your school’s or companies’ servers?

Have you ever wondered why some people get quotes of the day as their login messages and some get the same boring notices everyday?

Have you ever wondered how you can configure your system to deliver you some reasonably smart quotes and only discovered that you don’t have write permission to /etc/motd?

If you have answered yes to any of the above questions, then QuoteOfTheDay is for you. This module simply goes to The Quotations Page (www.quotationspage.com) to pull the quotes and motivational quotes of the day for the past 10 days, pickles the cached quotes in your home directory (so we are all good netizens), and randomly picks one to display on your console everytime you invoke the qotd script. As a bonus feature, you can also invoke this script in your .login files to see a quote of the day (or the session anyway) :P.

Download:

Just grab the source package from below or follow the URL to download the latest revision from the repository.

Install:

Unzip or untar the package, change directory into the extracted distribution and type:

$ python setup.py install

or if you want to do a user-specific installation:

$ python setup.py install --install-lib $YOUR_PYTHON_SITE_PACKAGES_PATH --install-scripts $YOUR_PYTHON_SCRIPT_PATH

or

$ python setup.py install --home ~/

or something to these effects, as long as the end-users have access to the qotd script.

If you want to see a quote every time you login using a terminal, you can put something similiar to the following in your .bash_profile or .bashrc if you use BASH.

if [ -f ~/bin/qotd ]; then ~/bin/qotd; fi

As usual, consult your shell’s manual to find out how to invoke a script at login time.

Feedback and Bug reports:

See this GitHub repository.

Release Notes:

• 0.7.3 Moved to GitHub and re-added to PyPi

• 0.7.1 No more ugly stacktraces when internet connection cannot be established

• 0.7 release Fixed a few Unicode handling bugs, most notably a crasher and replace the Unicode replacement character with a space.

• 0.7b4 Simplified error handling code.

• 0.7b3 Rewrote connection handling to deal with redirects Added extra robustness to deal with bad XML data.

• 0.7b2 Fixed bug where weird unicode string bombs out str().

• 0.7b1 Initial beta release.