One thing I’ve added to my own desktop, is the Zen poem posted daily on the website DailyZen.com. It took a little work to be able to do it, so I thought I’d post my script. This is based  on the script to fetch a quote from Encarta as posted on Flickr by barm, so credit goes to him for getting me started.

This can all be pasted into GeekTool itself, or you can create a separate shell script (eg. dailyzen.sh), which is what I’ve done, for easy editing. It’s a short one-liner, but there’s a lot going on:

curl -s http://www.dailyzen.com/ | sed -n "/<\!--Add Quote for correct day-->/,/<\/TD>/p"|sed -e "s/<[^>]*>//g" |strings|fold -sw60

curl of course is the Unix utility to fetch an URL, and grabs the contents of the front page of http://www.dailyzen.com/. sed then extracts the portion between the comment and the closing </TD> tag, which contains the poem. The second sed command strips all HTML tags. I used strings to reliably get rid of some stray carriage returns, and finally fold wraps the poem to a nice width without breaking words, as GeekTool would do otherwise.

The script is straightforward to add to GeekTool, it’s simply a Shell command (either pasted in, or calling the dailyzen.sh file). I set the refresh time to 21600; 6 hours is enough to make sure it’s updated in the morning. I used Book Antiqua Italic 20pt for the text, white with 20% opacity.

And here’s the end result:

My GeekTool Desktop, with DailyZen quote