I’ve done it! I’ve gotten the fortune plugin to behave exactly the way I wanted it to. Obviously there’s a ways to go on it – the randomization is not so random, it’s not as pretty as it could be (and I don’t know how it’d even look on another blog), there’s no custom fortunes file, there’s no toggle for offensive-fortunes, &c, but the structure is there. As timmmmyboy pointed out, this is close enough to full-baked for Google. Over the next Little While I’ll be rolling out the above-named improvements and adding features – and I hope you’ll tell me what you want in a plugin like this. Here’s what we have so far on the to-do list:

Here’s what this plugin needs to do:

1. Read from a fortunes file or files in the plugin directory
2. Parse them into an array of strings
3. Randomly select one from the array
4. Display it after the header displays
5. Have an options menu that allows the user to toggle offensive fortunes
6. Also in the options menu, a list of the fortune files by subject (UNIX, Star Trek, &c are the traditional ones, but they can be updated for more modern sensibilities).
7. Allow the user to add fortunes to their own custom file. Display the contents of the file on that options page.

What else, people?