The Quote Machine

The Quote Machine is a web site that combines randomly selected quotations with randomly selected images. I used to have my email signature that picked random quotes to include in my emails. The quotes were curated by me over many, many years. People would always comment on them and seemed to look forward to them. Once I got into some higher management positions, I felt I needed to have a more "professional" signature, since I was more often dealing with external people and not just internal co-workers.

I thought it would be nice to have some form of virtual or dynamic wall display that would rotate through the quotes. To spice it up a bit, I figured I could add some images. I have a collection of scenic pictures I have taken over the years that mostly just sit on my computer. This immediately reminded me of those inspirational posters, so I used that as the main design theme.

Besides randomly selecting quotes and images, the main feature is that the "poster" will dynamically scale to fit whatever window size you have in your browser. This, along with a "full page" display mode is what would allow me to turn a spare computer/monitor into a virtual, dynamic poster.

The back end logic of the site is written in PHP, with some simple MySQL database backing it up. The more complicated logic lies in the JavaScript that does the dynamic scaling of the page to fit the browser window. Then, there is the obligatory HTML and CSS needed to complete the implementation.