I wrote a little python script to help people get motivated to write more*. It compares the word count of a text file (by default “mywork.txt”) to a target number; if you’ve exceeded your target, it will congratulate you and download a recent picture of a kitten from flickr.
I wrote this over a couple hours, so it’s mostly rough edges. It depends on having wc and wget installed (which you already do if you have linux). I know it works on Python 2.7.2, but it should work on anything > Python 2.5.
Installation instructions:
1. Install the Python flickrapi module (on Ubuntu, sudo apt-get install python-flickrapi)
2. Download and extract this motivator script zip file.
3. Get a Flickr API key; it’s super easy, just sign into flickr and fill out a 2 line form.
3. Edit the .motivator file with your target # of words and with your Flickr API key. (Can’t find .motivator? try pushing ctrl-h to show hidden files if you’re using Ubuntu.)
4. Write more words into mywork.txt than your target number of words.
5. From the command line, go to the motivator folder and run “python motivator.py”
6. Collect your kitten photograph from the rewards folder.
Don’t like kittens (you monster)? You can change the rewardtag variable in .motivator to whatever flickr tag you like.
Enjoy!
* Actually, it was more to play with Python for an evening. I will probably never touch this again, but it was fun and, who knows, maybe someone will get something out of it.
