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 21 posts previously published on January 8th

• 2022
  • 30% Misunderstood is the New 60000 Times Faster? Almost 10 years ago I fell into likely a vain pursuit of any shred of fact to support the contention that “humans process visual information 60,000 times faster than text.” And despite trying every approach I could conjure, including offering a cash prize, the trail ran cold back to 1982 (all the blogged efforts are […]
• 2019
  • Turning Up the SPLOTbox Amp to 11.5: New Features It’s felt like maybe as long as a week since I blogged something about SPLOTs… that’s a long span 😉 But in that time I have been doing some major banging on the tubes and pedals to add big new features to the SPLOTbox theme. This theme was one of the later ones done, and […]
• 2018
  • Objects With Meaning Yesterday I lost a dog leash in the woods. What’s the big deal? I took my friend Kevin who was visiting, on one of my specialty semi brutal hikes, a near 7 mile bushwack, up the top of the mountain we see from my house. We were working our way around a steep section, the […]
• 2016
  • On Medium a Title is Often the Entire Story To totally mangle McLuhan is medium.com the message? Does it control the message? What is the message? I will unfairly pick on one story in my assertion that for a lot of what people publish on medium- the entire arc of the story is contained within a click bait title. And this has a lot […]
  • Corralling and TAG Branding #Western106 Tweets

    Me: Holy frijole! (slaps head)

    I’ve been yawing and yammering out in Twitter Land with the #western106 hashtag and plum forgot to set up a corral collectin’ pen with the Twitter TAGS Tool by

  • Apparently A Man Without A Map for #Western106

    There shure is plenty of whooping it up out there in the riding pen, with all these folks coming in with all shiny intentions of doing Western106 with this outfit.

    Lots of that action is ...

• 2014
  • An Interview with the Wiki Gardener I spent 3 weeks in June 2012 in Vancouver (never a bad destination) in large part to learn from the great tech gurus at UBC. I was reminded of something I did during that experience that somehow never got blogged. It started with a fantastic, impromptu twitter exchange started today by Mike Caulfield TWEET DELETED! […]
  • Happy Second Birthday, ds106 Daily Create cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Vanessa Pike-Russell Two years ago today the ds106 Daily Create was launched with its first challenge, TDC1, “Create a Photograph that features a repeating pattern”. In honor of that, this is one of the rare times we repeat the same prompt, for TDC731: We’ve […]
• 2013
  • Call Me Mr Lucky cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Meet Lucky, one of the two dogs I am housesitting for three weeks; my friend Sabra is off for a vacation in Italy. Lucky and Gunner are big mixed breed rescue dogs, very mellow and affectionate. Lucky, is not so lucky with some problems of his rear […]
• 2012
  • Before the Shark There was the Tuber Only because @echoln tweeted her extra large yam comes this un-necessary Yam Yarn assignment for ds106 Yeah, yeah, yam sharks might be a little scary, but nothing is more terrifying than the Great Orange Tuber, the classic story of all times. This was a quick PhotoShop cut and layer job, based on a movie poster […]
  • Get in Creative Shape   It’s simple. Do something every day, and you get better at it. Easier said than done? Well, let’s look at what’s happening at the ds106 DailyCreate and maybe it will take the pressure off. Jim has already written up how it has progressed so far; this is something we talked about last year before […]
  • Dead Dropping The day before yesterday, I journeyed with my partner in art crime to a brick wall on a side street of Fort Erie, Ontario, and cemented a USB thumb drive into the wall: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Why? Because, very much like the PirateBox, it is public digital art […]
• 2010
  • Gump On Openness cc licensed flickr photo shared by ryancr While the blogs continue to bounce more banter on openness and open education, one more oblique suggestion based on the deep philosophical musings of The Gumped One: Open is as Open does.  Share this barking on social media
  • Peeking At Code: Tynt Tool for Linktribution cc licensed flickr photo shared by hangdog Ah, there is nothing like the smell of serendipity in the morning… One of my favorite things in looking at web sites is finding some secret or some method entangled in the HTML of the source code of the page. I love view source. I love the tags. […]
• 2008
  • Yep, More Flickr Love Oh flickr, how I adore thee! my love runneth over… But after a lot of blog rants, its just so nice to say some nice things about nice people. Nice! I always get extra excited when my RSS feed for comments on my pix lights up in that “unread” color, so I checked out a […]
• 2006
  • Faculty Convocation, Tinto, Podcasts and Media Coming This past Friday was the largest event our office coordinates, Faculty Convocation 2006, held the first day of faculty accountability for Spring semester. We had 630 people pre-registered (online via our database system) plus well over 120 walk-in registrants. This has been a Maricopa event dating back to the era of chalk… I am not […]
  • Flickr DVD Ordered For what its worth, I decided to give the Englaze Flickr Backup to DVD service a try. Ordering was pretty easy- pick one of the last 200 photos to be printed on the label (I chose my hammock perspective), enter a title, etc, and provide a credit card. I had a shade under 1000 photos, […]
• 2005
  • For Computer Games Let’s Hear it for the Underdogs (And Another Long Tail?) Here is a CDB “web good dog” nod to “Home of the Underdogs” a site devoted to preserving “underrated” computer games many, but not all of the being “ambandonware” or titles no longer available: Home of the Underdogs is a non-profit site dedicated to the preservation and promotion of underrated PC games (and a few […]
• 2004
  • The Ray of MLX Hope: Nutrition Faculty As a brighter followup to the repository folly, I am excited by an event planned next week by a lead faculty member in the Nutrition area at one of our colleges. As she explained, there are not a large number of faculty in this discipline across of colleges and many of the classroom teachers are […]
  • Repository Folly… By rule, I usually avoid use of the “R-word” (repository, too close to the “S-word”), but wanted to launch, here just a few notches into a new calendar, my pessimism on the aspirations of those creating these magical collections of “learning objects.” The folly is that educators will give up some time to share information […]
  • How Shapers of Your Future Write Ahhh, there is nothing like literate, thoughtful email feedback… if only it happened more often than Arizona blizzards. For more than 9 years, we have gotten a stream of emails via our free, online Writing HTML Tutorial, most coming from lesson 12 where we teach you how to write a hyperlink that triggers an email. […]

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 11 posts previously published on January 15th

• 2025
  • Blog blog blog 2024 In the grand tradition of end of the year blog efforts, the summarizing and blog navel gazing… I failed on finding the energy. And I’m late. But with the inspiration of a legendary academic research paper, I bring you my year in blogging. Blog blog blog “Blog Blog blog Blog Blog Blog“. Blog blog blog: […]
• 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 21 posts previously published on January 8th

• 2022
  • 30% Misunderstood is the New 60000 Times Faster?
• 2019
  • Turning Up the SPLOTbox Amp to 11.5: New Features
• 2018
  • Objects With Meaning
• 2016
  • On Medium a Title is Often the Entire Story
  • Corralling and TAG Branding #Western106 Tweets
  • Apparently A Man Without A Map for #Western106
• 2014
  • An Interview with the Wiki Gardener
  • Happy Second Birthday, ds106 Daily Create
• 2013
  • Call Me Mr Lucky
• 2012
  • Before the Shark There was the Tuber
  • Get in Creative Shape
  • Dead Dropping
• 2010
  • Gump On Openness
  • Peeking At Code: Tynt Tool for Linktribution
• 2008
  • Yep, More Flickr Love
• 2006
  • Faculty Convocation, Tinto, Podcasts and Media Coming
  • Flickr DVD Ordered
• 2005
  • For Computer Games Let’s Hear it for the Underdogs (And Another Long Tail?)
• 2004
  • The Ray of MLX Hope: Nutrition Faculty
  • Repository Folly…
  • How Shapers of Your Future Write

.

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)