A Plugin For Your Blogged Past

Once you have a few years of blogging in your archives, you thus have some history (doh). And I made a little plugin to make it more visible, to generate a list of previous year’s post published on the current day.

Just peek at my own page using this.

It all started with a tweet from John Johnston.

Liked: Remembering the past through photos: https://t.co/T4CriwyOaB

— john johnston (@johnjohnston) January 13, 2019

John has an On This Day page that generates a list of his own posts published on the current day. I found it interesting, and guessed he might have used a plugin. I looked at two I found in the WordPress repository, but they did not do the trick, so I took the obvious step of asking John in twitter.

I like that feature- is it a plugin or John Johnston magic code?

— Alan Levine (@cogdog) January 13, 2019

Not surprisingly it was something he wrote himself. Not surprisingly, he shared it.

Both 🙂 very simple plugin most of code borrowed from stackexchange. https://t.co/e3iKJ25Xa7 I intended to extend to work with date from post or param at some point.
I find the results fascinating.

— john johnston (@johnjohnston) January 13, 2019

I gave John’s plugin a try on this blog, but ran into some problems- in the editor, the shortcode was outputting to the top of the screen (I think it might need a (!is_admin()) conditional to make sure it’s not running in the dashboard?) and also, on my page, it was inserting content at the top of the page, above the content I had written (guessing because it hooks the main query).

So I rolled up my sleeves and coded my own, now available as the Posted Today plugin. It provides a shortcode that could be used anywhere in your WordPress site (post, page, widget?) but mainly the intent is for a Page.

Adding

There are 10 posts previously published on October 16th

• 2018
  • For Her Birthday, another episode of Granny’s Stories The calendar reminder notifies me that yesterday would have been my grandmother’s 113th birthday. If I could talk to her, I’d tease about that being a lucky number. She would laugh that cackle I loved hearing. What I do have is audio I recorded with her in 1994 on actual tape (micro-cassette) . Granny’s Tape […]
• 2017
  • SPLOTpoint: Now With Arrow Key Navigation It’s good to have short cuts. I’m a mad spree of code update for my pile of WordPress themes I plan to use in my workshops down under. One thing I noticed in my own dog-fooding with the SPLOTpoint I built as a presentation platform. The navigation between “slides” is way down at the bottom: […]
• 2016
  • Noble Bob Stopped By Editors Note: This blog has a strict policy agains guest posts, but sometimes you have to relax the rules. My pal Bob stopped by unexpectedly and rather made himself at home. He wrote this. Heya. This here Arizona scenery is more spectacular than Alan let on. Life got a little crazy last week, and I […]
• 2011
  • Double Spubble I have the ds106 fever- I could not resist Jim Groom’s new Spubble assignment (still looking for the tags in the ds106 assignment mix see http://ds106.us/2011/10/16/your-very-own-spubble/): Learn to love yourself, grab a picture of yourself in which your body language, actions, gestures, etc. suggest one thing and then play off that using a speech bubble. […]
  • Dr Oliver Bird Call cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by noii’s Since Michael Branson Smith’s ds106 class is moving into the audio portion of the course, I devised a new assignment for the audio section. And this is something I need as well in my own adventure to find the Center of the Internet. So […]
  • How Innocent People End Up Fugitives Before I left the railroad car I was trapped in, I had time to fill, so played around with the Triple Troll Quotes assignment again for ds106. Given my current situation, I found the perfect theme, and 2/3 are hitchcockian Got them? The answer lies elsewhere.  Share this barking on social media
  • Escaping the Hatch Good morning everyone and thanks for the stream of messages. It really helps me cope as I have yet had any contact with other people in over 48 hours. I want to send a big shout out to Rowan Peter who has taken on the search aid from Melbourne. I was going to say “From […]
• 2004
  • Email as the Most Used And Worst Method of “Knowledge Management” Email is the communication norm. It is no more special than the phone. But it is the worst way to manage information over time or the “KM” buzzword (which by the way I have never understood— “mamaging knowledge”, it sounds like managing “wisdom” or quantifying ethics or s snipe hunt). I have noticed recently, in […]
  • Stoopid Web Design Confounded By Stoopider Customer Service As a single developer, I have programmed and designed a number of web transaction systems, and not one of them was limited to use on platform or web browsers (well to be honest, our 1998 Hero’s Journey site has some JavaScript quirks that prevent full use on some browsers, then again, I had no idea […]
• 2003
  • “Building the MLX…” presentation Faithful CDB readers get this early glimpse at Building an Innovation Collection (with a bit of Competition and Bribery), a presentation for Monday, October 20, at the League for Innovation Conference on Information Technology in Milwaukee. This is less a technical presentation and more about the strategies we have used to (try and) build up […]

is all a page needs to generate output like mine a listing of all posts on the current day (like today’s show all past posts for January 15). I added post excerpts and some logic to group together posts in the same day (because heck sometimes I post 4 times a day) and added excerpts as well.

The output has CSS classes so you can set some design (like I remove bullets from the years, and change line height, font size for excerpts).

I was going to blog a screenshot yo show today’s output, but realized I had designed a better means. After getting the plugin to actually work (meaning not barfing errors because I dropped a semi-colon!) I started thinking of options for the shortcode. Including the month and day like means with

There are 10 posts previously published on January 15th

• 2020
  • She Paints Llamas My little big sister Harriet always has display the real artist talent in the family. She’s done it again. A surprise package in the mail came with a new watercolor, this of the llamas that live up the road from Cori and I. She has not set up her easel here yet (especially now that […]
• 2019
  • A Plugin For Your Blogged Past Once you have a few years of blogging in your archives, you thus have some history (doh). And I made a little plugin to make it more visible, to generate a list of previous year’s post published on the current day. Just peek at my own page using this. It all started with a tweet […]
• 2016
  • A medium Sized Rant on Customer Service and a $5 Keychain I am far from ready and will never do all my blogging on medium.com… but to understand how it works, and just to have a different writing experience, I do like to use it every now and then. Perhaps it will be read more or less, but it is a different form. If I were […]
  • When I Grow Up I Want to Be a [Pretend] Cowboy [on the Internet] I’m not sure as a kid if I ever uttered the “I want to grow up to be a cowboy” line (maybe Mom listened to Waylon and Willie). How would a suburban Baltimore kid in the 1970s even get the idea? Easy. TV. I’m digging back in the memory layers for what I might have […]
• 2015
  • YAS (Yet Another SPLOT) TRU Collector Not bad for a couple hours of WordPress gnashing. A new Smallest/Simplest Possible Learning Online Tool. Meet the TRU Collector It’s not all that novel. The idea came from TRU Instructional Designers Kelly Warnock and Melissa Melissa Jakubec who will be doing a workshop next Friday on finding openly licensed images (and we will have […]
  • The Making of The You Show Episode 1 The You Show has left the gate with our first week of activity, and as usual (well twice in a row), Brian and I return in our dual roles as hosts and back stage techs. In The You Show and … Continued
  • A Photo A Day Keeps the Dullness Away We are rolling out today the You Show’s The Daily – a site that will generate a small creative challenge every day at 8:00am PT. A new one will be […]
• 2013
  • Fall 2012 ds106 Course Evaluations cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by B_Zedan Ripping the page out of the Jim Groom playbook (again), and as I did when I taught ds106 the first time last Spring in parallel to him, here I share the class evaluations from the Fall 2010 section of ds106. Frankly I love […]
  • Howdy, ETMOOC My introduction video for the newly launched ETMOOC – something I might be lukewarm about were it not something that Alec Couros was fostering. His own network connectivity, not the linking for the same of linking, is something you want to be part of- witness over 1000 people who signed up, 200 of them fitting […]
• 2011
  • Sorry for Ignoring Book Recommendations My humble apologies- Two weeks ago I asked for recommendations for beach reading and got a great list— and I started one not on the list! I have a good reason- it was a Christmas present from one of my longest known best friends, who wrote inside of it: I hope you still find time […]

I can create a page for posts on an arbitrary date (see example) if I really want to share what I have written on January 15s – hey it was the birthdate of the TRU Collector SPLOT.

And one more enhancement, if you don’t want the excerpts (like maybe in sidebar text widget, you can do this with another shortcode

There are 10 posts previously published on October 16th

• 2018
  • For Her Birthday, another episode of Granny’s Stories
• 2017
  • SPLOTpoint: Now With Arrow Key Navigation
• 2016
  • Noble Bob Stopped By
• 2011
  • Double Spubble
  • Dr Oliver Bird Call
  • How Innocent People End Up Fugitives
  • Escaping the Hatch
• 2004
  • Email as the Most Used And Worst Method of “Knowledge Management”
  • Stoopid Web Design Confounded By Stoopider Customer Service
• 2003
  • “Building the MLX…” presentation

.

I’m pretty impressed 😉

And this got me thinking yesterday, as I was working on an eCampus Ontario project launching in edX plus some other thoughts trying to help my wife figure out things for her course hosted in Moodle. These systems have to try to include the functionality everybody might want, that’s how they get ginormous (and full of menus, options to wade through).

And while they might be extensible via plugins too (that only a server admin can add), it’s different from WordPress in that I, as a site owner, can find or write (and share) my own small extensions to do what I want. It’s much closer, IMHO, to the original dream of the web than dream of something like MS Office (where I still everytime fail to find out how to format tabs).

And we have a prize for early adopters 😉 (the prize is a thank you reply)

Cool tool. And I've added it to my blog. Thanks, @cogdog! https://t.co/MVg8H4YXer

— Bud Hunt (@budtheteacher) January 15, 2019

I added to the plugin site a place to see examples, so if you use this plugin either share a link or go ahead and fork that readme and do it yourself.

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Featured Image: My Photo Made the April Calendar flickr photo by cogdogblogshared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)