Gmail Random Signature Quote in PHP

February 26, 2010 Wade 5 comments

Feb. 26, 2010

Google has removed the Random Signature option from Labs this week. The feature is not longer supported. The links below can be used to supply a RSS feed to your website or iGoogle page.

May 20, 2009

Updated both quotes.php and inspirational_feed.php to encode text to fix reported issue. Also upated the example code.

May 6, 2009

I have created a new inspirational quote feed. Here is the link:
http://www.wadesword.org/RSS/Quotes/inspirational_feed.php

You can use this with your Gmail random signature (as described below), Google homepage, or in any other RSS feed reader.

Enjoy!

Dec, 2008

I rewrote my ASP script in PHP, so it can be hosted on this website (full source code below). If you are using my Gmail random signature please update Gmail to use this one:

http://www.wadesword.org/RSS/Quotes/quotes.php

The feed above is viewable in Firefox and Safari, but not IE.

The code grabs 10 random quotes from a file with about 300 quotes and tries to create ten RSS feed items. Gmail currently has a limit of 96 characters, so the code ignores any quotes that will be over 96 characters. This currently averages between five to seven good quotes.

Once you add this to Gmail, you have to compose an email, discard that email, then compose another one, before the quote will show up on the bottom of the new email.

Gmail Random Quote as the Signature

Here is the default quote feed that Gmail uses, in case you would like to switch back:

http://www.brainyquote.com/link/quotefu.rss

Source Code

Example code can be found here:

http://www.wadesword.org/RSS/Quotes/RssQuotesPHP.zip

Here is the example code running on my server:

http://www.wadesword.org/RSS/Quotes/feed_sample.php

PHP, Problems Fixed Gmail, Gmail Labs, Random Signature, rss

#1 | Written by Josema about 5 months ago.

OMG, there is no more random quotes on signature. A fail from gmail!!
#2 | Written by Nimesh Dhruve about 6 months ago.

Why they have stopped this. I really love it.
- #3 | Written by Wade about 6 months ago.
  
  I know that some of the Gmail lab features are now built into Gmail (like if you write see attached Gmail will prompt you if no attachment has been added). When Gmail added these lab features they removed some labs that they felt were not being used. Hopefully, they will add the random signature feature back at some point.
#4 | Written by Nick about 1 year ago.

these are great, have been using them for months now. Looks like the RSS feeds stopped working…any update?
#5 | Written by zizimars14 about 1 year ago.

Hi, this is great!!
Just a simple questions… How to put windows-1250 encoding? Some letters aren’t showing properly now… Tnx

#1 | Pinged by Wade’s Word » Random Quote Feeds about 2 years ago.

[...] If you want to use these on Gmail see my previous post Gmail Random Signature. [...]
#2 | Pinged by Wade’s Word » Gmail Labs Random Signature about 2 years ago.

[...] (12/22/2008) New PHP code available here: http://wadesword.org/Blog/?p=233 [...]

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