About this project

This project began its life in 2008 as a simple PHP script wrapper for the Unix fortune command. The script converted the pseudo-random plain text fortune cookie message intended for display as a “quote of the day” on the command line upon login, into rich HTML for the Web.

There were originally only two fortune configurations: one that displayed messages from the default fortune command on the Linux server where the site was hosted, and the second from a custom set of one-liner jokes by American comedian Steven Wright, affectionately referred to as aphorisms in the initial blog post.

There were plans to make the fortunes available via RSS, however after the initial development, the idea went ignored for years. In September of 2018, some visual formatting enhancements were added including modern Web fonts and CSS transition effects when the fortune loads in the browser.

In January of 2019, the project concept evolved into an entire website, re-built with Jekyll, hosted on GitHub Pages. The application logic was refactored and the PHP back-end replaced with a client-side JavaScript application to load the quotes from JSON-formatted datasets.

The compilation and sourcing of additional fortune files, and the painstaking transition from the fortune file format into JSON was manually done over the course of a few weeks in February 2019.

The code base for this website is Open Source and anyone may contribute additional fortune sources. The development roadmap contains some loose ideas of the direction the project will be headed.

– James