08:55 am - QotD
"Let me say for the umpteenth time, George W. is not a stupid man. The IQ of his gut, however, is open to debate. In Texas, his gut led him to believe the death penalty has a deterrent effect, even though he acknowledged there was no evidence to support his gut's feeling. When his gut, or something, causes him to announce that he does not believe in global warming -- as though it were a theological proposition -- we once again find his gut ruling that evidence is irrelevant. In my opinion, Bush's gut should not be entrusted with making peace in the Middle East." -- Molly Ivins (via Jone Johnson Lewis' collection of quotations on about.com)
Which leads me to my next question: does scribbld have a QotD, or did you get it elsewhere? If you did get it from scribbld, where is it?!
Automagic QotD
I use a Unix/Linux *J client called Clive, where I just replaced references to livejournal.com in the source code with scribbld.net and recompiled it. *poof*, instant Scribbld client. Clive works from the command line in a text window ("MS-DOS Command Prompt" in Windows, "Terminal app" if you're a Mac user; actually I use telnet or ssh to log into a Unix machine at my ISP) without even any menus or move-the-cursor-around bits (it does invoke the text editor of your choice, if needed). This makes it ideal for use within a shell script (think "batch file" if you're a Windows user).
I use the Unix 'cron' command to schedule a script I wrote, to run every morning. That script plucks the first quote from my file-of-quotes -- my QotD queue -- and posts it to each mirror of my blog then archives it.
I know there are implementations of 'cron' for Windows (it should be built in on MacOS, and Linux wouldn't seem quite right without it), but I haven't checked to see whether Clive will compile under Windows. There may be another suitable client though -- it doesn't have to be quite as bare-bones as I prefer to work with; it just needs to be able to take comand-line arguments to post an entry without direct user input.
I insert by hand the HTML that the <lj user=""> pseudo-tag expands to when I refer to an LJ/GJ/IJ/CJ/Blurty/Scribbld user, so it looks right but points to the right place each place the entry is posted.
My script is pretty basic; I want to jazz it up a bit so that it can automatically pick a random uncheduled quote to post if there's no quote specifically assigned to the current date. Ifwhen I get around to "finishing" it, I may post it someplace in case anybody else wants to use it.
When I started using the cron script, it took a while for a couple of my bandmates to catch on ... they were a little disconcerted when they realized their way of checking to be sure I'm okay every morning -- see whether I'd posted the QotD -- wouldn't let them know something had happened to me until days or weeks later when my queue finally ran out.
Unless the author of Clive beats me to it, I need to get around to adding an option to set a tag when it posts an entry, so I can have the QotD script add a "qotd" tag to the entries it posts.