Quotely

Overview

Over the years I've slowly relearned to love reading again, especially with it not being a forced assignment tied to school. I gravitate towards ideas related to philosphy, environmentalism, how we should live as humans, enlightment, free will...the list goes on and on and on. One of my favorite habits while reading is to write down the lines that resonate with me. Ones that especially relate to my notions of ideal ways to live, things that inspire me to be better, or quite simply is just a bar. After a couple years and notes page with hundreds of quotes, I made Quotely as a simple way to bring some of my favorites in and spark a bit of creativity every morning when I check it.

How it Works

Quotely is fairly simple. All the quotes live in a public Gist as a JSON file, and each entry includes a quote, an optional speaker, a source, and a tag. I often leave the speaker blank when I don't know who said it, and the tags (literature, anime, film, etc.) are mainly there for future organization if I ever want to use them.

The widget pulls the gist, and checks how many entries there are, and then uses a date-based hashing function to pick one quote within that range. Giving us a pseudo-random daily quote. The selected quote is displayed on my homescreen matching my beige minimalist background along with information about the source and an optional speaker.

Link to code

The code for the application is here. I encourage you to clone my widget or perhaps create your own with the quotes that embody you.