Sven@Guckes.net ©1995-2003

Latest change: Wed Mar 26 19:19:19 CET 2003

Signatures

Signatures - an (automatically) appended text to Email and News Posts.


Sven's Pages on Signatures

Sven's signatures
All my current signatures are stored in one file. Most of the signatures are about Unix programs, containing uptodate info about latest versions and also some URLs to helpful webpages. As the file is plain text it compresses quite well - down to a third. That's a lot better than keeping each sig in a file of its own.
Size: 26K [970911], 33K [980706]

Cute Signatures
A small collection of signatures that I have found to be cute/good/nice. Of course they are all McQ. Have a look!

Improved Signatures
Big signatures and their four lines "equivalents". It was about time I put all those signatures that I edited for others onto a page. Enjoy!

alt.fan.warlord FAQ
The FAQ of the newsgroup alt.fan.warlord - all about signatures and the newsgroup that fights for the four-line-maximum standard.

Signature Rules
A mini-guide for signature rules.


Adding Signatures from within Vim using agrep

Managing signatures is easy with Vim and agrep. Just keep all signatures in one file, delimiting them with sigdashes, ie a line with only "-- " (dash-dash-space) in it (example: Sven's signature file).

Now you can extract all signatures which match a pattern with one simple command:

        agrep -d "^-- $" pattern signature.file
You can map this to a command within Vim easily:

nmap ,s :r!agrep -d "^-- $" /path/sig.file<S-Left> Now type in ",s" and give the pattern that should be in the signature you want. I usually use the name of the program I wish to give info about, and when agrep finds several matches then *all* matches get read in. I then delete all sigs but the one I want appended. That's it. [971208,990126]


Random Signatures

Some people just have to have a "random signature".

I personally do not like adding "random stuff" to my messages - but some people obviously do. But why those people do not use a newsserver which randomly accepts or denies their messages, I simply cannot tell. ;-)

Chosing a signature by random usually uses one of these methods:

GenSig [000307]
http://www.geeks.com/~robf/gensig/
Author: Rob Fugina robf@geekthing.com

Signify [000307]
http://www.debian.org/Packages/stable/mail/signify.html
Author: Brian White bcwhite@pobox.com

Elm: You can define a signature for local mails and remote mails - or simply one signature for all mails. See the setup file!

Pine: You can specify a signature file for every "role". Requires pine-4.20 (I think).

        [x] Enable-unix-pipe-command
            signature=/path/program|
Where /path/program may be a script, of course:
    echo "Sven Guckes guckes-pine@math.fu-berlin.de"
    /path/fortune ~/txt~/txt//myfortunes.dat

Mutt: You can specify and chose a different one with all hook commands, that is, folder-hook (based on the current folder name), send-hook (one of the recipient addresses of your outbound mail),


Other pages about signatures

Awater, Christof - christof@paefken.westfalen.de [990126]
http://www.westfalen.de/paefken/de.newusers/signaturen.txt
Signature collection. Each signature contains some pointers to basic info for Usenet newbies, usually FAQs and answers. In German. Nice.

Back, Adam [970912]
http://dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/
Author: Adam Back aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk
Contents: 100 ways to export cryptology as a signature.

Baker, "Donovan" - bakd@gwtc.net [980526]
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/LeftBank/6558/sigs.html
Some ready-to-edit signature environments with some ASCII Art.
Maybe the first interactive "backup daemon" on the Web. ;-)

Faase, Frans [970912,990129,001005]
http://home.planet.nl/~faase009/Signindex.html
http://wwwis.cs.utwente.nl:8080/~faase/Sign/ [obsolete]
http://wwwis.cs.utwente.nl:8080/~faase/Sign/ [defunct]
Author: Frans Faase (email withheld)
Contents: Lots and lots of signatures with some kind of code in all kinds of languages (mostly C, Perl, PostScript; awk, sed, Prolog, Lisp).

Jones, Alun [970912,2003-03-26]
http://users.aber.ac.uk/auj/sigs/
http://www.aber.ac.uk/~auj/sigs/ [obsolete]
Author: Alun Jones auj(at)aber.ac.uk
Contents: Sigs with Perl and PostScript programs that create nice pictures; also has the output of the programs as pictures (ASCII and GIFs).

Shan, Ken - ... [970912]
http://www.digitas.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/ken/sig
Author: Chung-chieh "Ken" Shan http://www.digitas.harvard.edu/~ken/
Contents: A script that allows you change Ken's signature. Yes, what *you* write will be appended to his signature in email and news.

Teufel, Stephanie - s.teufel@ndh.net [991031]
http://linux01.gwdg.de/~steufel/Zehn-Wege.html
"Das dreckige Dutzende - oder: wie man sich in den Linux-Gruppen so richtig beliebt macht"
A guide on how to post on Linux newsgroups to make "friends". Some points about signatures. In German.

Welling, George M. - welling@let.rug.nl [990126]
http://grid.let.rug.nl/~welling/sigcol.html
"A thematic collection of ASCII-art signatures"


URL:         http://www.math.fu-berlin.de/~guckes/sig/
Created:     Sun Oct 27 03:33:33 CET 1996
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Sven Guckes webpage-signatures@guckes.net