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.

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

I worked on a classic ASP page today that will create a RSS feed for Gmail’s Random Signature feature to display a random quote. This new feature is located in the Labs section of Gmail under settings. Once you turn this feature on, you can add this link on your main settings page:
(Removed use PHP link above) http://wadewb.com/WB/RSS/quotes/feed.asp

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 10 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 5-7 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.

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 for the example is here:
http://wadewb.com/WB/code/files/RandomQuoteFeed.zip