Those who are tired of reading the same old repetitive fortune cookies, you have come to the right place to learn the magic of configuring dynamic and more useful tips.

Prerequisites:

Kindly install the following tools from your package manager

• curl (pull the html page)
• html-xml-utils (manipulate html content)
• w3m (display text only from html)

Create a Bash Function to pull from your desired website:

For educational purposes, I’m picking up https://til.hashrocket.com.

curl -s https://til.hashrocket.com/random | hxnormalize -x | hxselect 'div.post__content'

• Use curl to pull a random html page from the website and put it in stdin -s flag
• hxnormalize pretty prints html content
• hxselect selects the target with our useful tip

In your .rc file (bashrc, .etc,.):

• Put the function and call it in a bash variable TIP=$(til_function).

if [ ! "$TIP" ]; then
  fortune 30% linux 30% beam 10% computers 10% science 10% debian 5% wisdom 5% work
else
  echo "$RANDOM_TIP" | w3m -dump -T 'text/html'
  echo "Pulled from https://til.hashrocket.com on $(date +'%d-%m-%Y %H:%M:%S')."
fi

• If the $TIP has no content (no internet connection / timeout), then fallback to local fortune cookies
• If $TIP has content, then use w3m to display or render the html content showing only textual content

The end result should look like the above screenshot Whenever you open a new terminal window or tab. Hope you enjoyed the tutorial!