I’ve started thinking today about programming a new version of the good ol' fortune program. Not so much because it doesn’t do its job, but I think that a plain text backend has certain limitations.

I will be releasing the source code once I have it at least partially working (that is, not feature complete, but roughly working).

Features I’m looking at are:

• SQLite Backend*
• Ability to tag individual fortunes (so one fortune can belong to many categories and more advanced filtering could be performed)*
• Ability to import old fortune files (pretty much a necessity)*
• Addition of individual fortunes from the command line.
• Mimic all the basic fortune functionality.*
• New XML import and export standards.
• Global and user-overriding fortune preferences.

Only the features with the *’s will be included in the first release.

I’ll be writing it in Python. Feel free to leave some comments as to what sort of features you’d like to see in a modern fortune application. In the future, additional database support may be provided.