quoth / about

What

This site is an attempt to apply the concept of tagging to the categorization of quotations from a myriad of sources (similar to Flickr and del.icio.us).

Why

I created this site as an evolution up from a slew of text files sitting in a folder on my hard drive containing hundreds of quotes. Most of them are gleaned from my q9 subscription.

Who

This site was created (and is maintained) by R.B. Boyer. Incidently I also have a blog and a wiki.

How

This site uses all the magical wonders of MySQL and PHP. There is also a backdoor interface that I built into the system to work with my local cache of incoming quotes via email. This allows me to throw away, reformat, and pretag the quotes coming in via my q9 subscription in a much more user-friendly manner; then, with a single click and via the power of cookies, the quotes are in Quoth. I'll document this soon, and possibly provide this local system for download.

How much

This site will always be free.

Features

Tags & tag intersections
RSS feeds for tags, users, and tags of a user
RSS autodiscovery
Ability to favorite a quote and add it to your personal list of choice picks. Also, you can re-tag the quote for your favorites list.
Dynamically maintained index browser.
bookmarklet
New as of 30 September 2005
- Now you can export pages of quotes in an XML file by simply appending ?export=1 to the URL of whatever page you are looking at. It will retrieve all quotes in whatever page filter you are using (and it doesn't paginate the results like when you browse the site). For server-load concerns, you cannot export all of the quotes from the entire site nor can you export quotes via a search query (by trying to visit http://quoth.nexusvector.net/?export=1 for example). To use this feature you must be logged-in. Please try to use it sparingly, however. I don't want to be forced to implement export-quotas or anything nasty like that.
New as of 12 June 2005
- Favoriting of quotes is independent from adding tags to other people's quotes. Using DHTML, the fav/unfav buttons present in the upper left of the dark bar above each quote respond immediately after pressing them, so you don't need to refresh the page just to mark a favorite quote.
- If you visit a quote's "personal" page by clicking on its ID number on the far right of the dark bar above each quote, you can see more about who has added which tags to each quote. Additionally, you can click "add new tag" and you will immedately be presented with a box in which you can type new tags to add to any quote (not just your own). Clicking the add button will update the list. You can also delete any tag from a quote that you have added by clicking the [X] symbol that follows the quote on this page.
- As before, a list of all quotes you have favorited is still available at:
  http://quoth.nexusvector.net/favorite/USERNAME/
- A history of quotes that you have tagged is available at:
  http://quoth.nexusvector.net/tagged/USERNAME/
- A complete stream of all quotes that you have favorited, tagged, or added to the system is available at:
  http://quoth.nexusvector.net/stream/USERNAME/
- As you travel to each of the pages streams, quotes, favorites, and tagged the sidebar's list of tags will update depending upon what page-view you are using at the time.
- Also, each of these pages can be filtered by tag and tag intersections like:
  http://quoth.nexusvector.net/PAGETYPE/USERNAME/TAG/ http://quoth.nexusvector.net/PAGETYPE/USERNAME/TAG1+TAG2/
- There's a System Message box that you should have seen at the top of some page. I created this to notify registered users when something has changed. Clicking on the "hide message" link will make it go away until I put up a new message.

Future goals

The code behind this is good enough to work, but not good enough to make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside all of the time. If there are any problems, that is why. (incidently, I do nightly backups of the database, in case something awful happens)

View the current plans for development and offer your suggestions at the wiki discussion page about Quoth. If you'd rather email me privately, you can do so at suggestions@quoth.nexusvector.net