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 11 posts previously published on August 15th

• 2015
  • I’m Not Quite Sure What Meemoo is… but it’s cool This is episode number 864 where in looking for one thing on the internet I end up falling into something else. In writing up a future UdG Agora Daily Try I was looking for a metaphor image to represent the idea of “random” and found this image: Way down in the caption of the photo […]
• 2014
  • I Found a Notebook in a Drawer creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog What was I looking for in the drawer in my office? An envelope? For some reason, I lost track of the task at hand, and noticed the black moleskin notebook with the SFMOMA logo. I remember it. And lost myself down a memory hole […]
• 2012
  • MOOC Ramming Speed I’ve been thinking about the pace of MOOCs, and then got bent on a track to make the animated GIF from one of my all time epic movies. The later thought was that this actually applies to any course, and of course a course (Wilbur, where are my oats?) has to have a schedule. But… […]
• 2011
  • DIY is Fixing Your Blog cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by PetitPlat – Stephanie Kilgast (in dolly mood) Anyone who does stuff knows you do stuff by doing it. Eh? Last night while I was visiting Alec Couros he asked me why there was no image in the right side of the header of my […]
• 2008
  • Movie Review: Shallow Plot, Flat Character, Lack of Direction cc licensed flickr photo Day 200/365 “Yawn” by Wellstone This may be in the “pot calling kettle black” category> tag, but I have this long standing growl in my belly about Screencasts. The technology is great, lots of tools, free ones, but when we talk about them it seems to be always about the tools. […]
• 2007
  • Fishing for Web 2.0 Gems, Not Laundry Lists I think I have a new mode of developing my workshops and presentations, which of course, does not involve crafting it way ahead of time– but rather than doing my planning, and taking my best shot at it, I am now just tossing out some half baked ideas, picking up feedback/suggestions, and asking people to […]
• 2005
  • Play Flickr Tag With Me flickr foto Cool Dogavailable on my flickr Possible new logo? To answer Cadu’s request, I’m starting a new tag game– find photos of signs featuring dogs, and tag them with dogsign (and might as well tag them dog as well to beef up the canine tag rankings). What could make a better logo than a […]
  • Cadu On Alert About FlickrTagFight! flickr foto Cadu On Alertavailable on my flickr What? Did I hear that cats beat us dogs in the FlickrTagFight? I cannot believe it! Something must be done! More dog tags! More dog tags! More DOG tags! “This cat tag thing is out of control! I say upload your dog photos en masse and show […]
  • FlickrTagFightClub The first rule of FlickrTagFightClub is we do not talk about FlickrTagFightClub… nah, talk about it. Blog about it. See FlickrTagFight, a site that lets you compare two tags, side by side, head to head, in a knock down, winner take all tag fight– see how “Man vs Machine”: And it’s not even close! Machines […]
• 2004
  • Web-Unwieldly And Bowl Driving Ear (I am reaching for an all-time obscure title for this entry). Out of curiosity, I followed a link from a TrackBack notification to this entry on Rino’s Blog (in dutch): Weblogs voor studenten OK, we zijn het er na de posts van Alan Levine , Scott Leslie, Sybilla, Pierre, en ondergetekende en de bijbehorende kommentaren […]
  • Is Someone Calling Us? flickr foto Is Someone Calling Us?available on my flickr Cadu and Mickey hear the sound of a bag of potato chips being opened… 3 miles away! It’s hard enough to get people to pay attention to your blog, but when the dogs have wandering attention, what is one to do? That’s okay as Mickey (right) […]

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 11 posts previously published on August 15th

• 2015
  • I’m Not Quite Sure What Meemoo is… but it’s cool
• 2014
  • I Found a Notebook in a Drawer
• 2012
  • MOOC Ramming Speed
• 2011
  • DIY is Fixing Your Blog
• 2008
  • Movie Review: Shallow Plot, Flat Character, Lack of Direction
• 2007
  • Fishing for Web 2.0 Gems, Not Laundry Lists
• 2005
  • Play Flickr Tag With Me
  • Cadu On Alert About FlickrTagFight!
  • FlickrTagFightClub
• 2004
  • Web-Unwieldly And Bowl Driving Ear
  • Is Someone Calling Us?

.

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)