The Quote Page(s)

October 1, 2022 - Reading time: 4 minutes

My old site had a page of favorite quotes, inspired by the back-of-door creation by brothers Buddy and Seymour Glass, described in a favorite short story: "Zooey", by J.D. Salinger (page 176 in my Little, Brown mass market paperback):

"He closed the door behind him as tightly as possible, and with an expression implying that the absence of a key in the lock met with his disapproval. He gave the room itself scarcely a glance, once he was inside it. Instead, he turned around and deliberately faced a sheet of what had once been snow-white beaverboard that was nailed uncompromisingly to the back of the door. It was a mammoth specimen, very nearly as long and as wide as the door itself. One could have believed that its whiteness, smoothness, and expanse had at one time cried out rather plaintively for India ink and block lettering. Certainly not in vain, if so. Every inch of visible surface of the board had been decorated, with four somewhat gorgeous-looking columns of quotations from a variety of the world's literatures. The lettering was minute, but jet-black and passionately legible, if just a trifle fancy in spots, and without blots or erasures. The workmanship was no less fastidious even at the bottom of the board, near the doorsill, where the two penmen, each in his turn, had obviously lain on their stomachs. No attempt whatever had been made to assign quotations or authors to categories or groups of any kind. So that to read the quotations from top to bottom, column by column, was rather like walking through an emergency station set up in a flood area, where, for example, Pascal had been unribaldly bedded down with Emily Dickinson, and where, so to speak, Baudelaire's and Thomas a Kempis's toothbrushes were hanging side-by-side."

Now, four columns of anything on the Web is asking for trouble in these days of spinning mobile devices, but two columns seemed reasonable with the hyper-efficient lit.css stylesheet I'm using on the main site. That new page can be found here.

The quotes themselves were originally maintained in a MySQL table, and at less than 150 entries added since the project began, eons ago, this is maybe too much overhead. In the new world, all of the quote content is migrated to a SQLite data file, with columns that provide the quote, author, source, layout hints (left, right or center on the page), and a "Really Use This?" flag. (Some of the quotes don't wear well with time, or just get a little stale, and this is an easy way to filter without deleting anything).

I add quotes to these tables with a standard database program (phpMyAdmin for MySQL, DB Browser for SQLite, or BeeKeeper Studio for either). The page would work as well, and probably faster, just reading from a structured text file, but my goal was to link a few tools together, so this approach is more diverting.

Generating a list of quotes in random order is a simple SQL and PHP task, and the page setup only takes a few minutes. Deciding how you want to arrange the various elements of the quote is what takes up all of the time. You never feel like you've really nailed it.

While working on this, I also came across '58 bytes of CSS to look great nearly everywhere', a great github post by Joey Burzynski. I opted to use his slightly extended 100 bytes of CSS to create an alternate quotes page. I have a real Hate/Hate relationship with CSS, so these efforts to provide basic, clean design really appeal to me.