A selection of Bahá'í quotes that can be integrated into any kind of software project. The intent is to provide downloadable quotes in a small variety of formats (text, json, yaml, xml, etc.) along with some scripts for doing sanity checks and conversions.
The initial bootstraping of this is work-in-progress. Right now I have a collection of quotes for use by the UNIX fortune program. By August 2015 I hope to have a minimal framework that others can expand on if they have any desire. If you're reading this after August 2015, I haven't met my goal and you should consider this project defunct.
The purpose of this mini-project is to gather Bahá'í quotes for any development project which whishes to use them. The major goals are:
- To provide the quotes! The most basic purpose is to aggregate quotes to be easily consumed by software.
- Avoid duplicating effort. Our time is limitted, so let's work together!
- Usability. It should be easy for anyone to use these in their software project, small or large.
- Authenticity. We want to be sure the quotes match exactly the Bahá'í writings, down to the punctuation. The official source is http://www.bahai.org/library/.
Some principles of this project are:
- Low developer barrier-to-entry. It should be easy for anyone to add quotes to the project, for example.
- Minimal Dependencies. For now, the only language is Ruby.
- Incremental growth. This project is very small at the moment. It will grow only as there is need to do so.
- Common quote format. To reduce redundancy, all the quotes in the "database" should be in the same format.
- The main quotes "database" is /source.json. This is the file to update!!
- Quotes in different formats (yaml, xml, etc.) will also go in /quotes, and these will be generated automaticaly.
- Each library gets its own folder in /lib. Each library should have its own README.md file in its folder with all the details on how to use it.
- Anything common to all the libraries will go in /shared.
There's a script, /shared/generate.py, which takes the shared.json file and translates it into the several available formats. It also does sanity checking and sorting on the quotes.json file. It should always be run as a post-commit hook when committing so that the best-available quotes files are in the repository at all times.
- Automatically slurp the quotes from the official website?
- Create a web-based API to serve these quotes to other applications?
- (Your idea here)