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 12 posts previously published on August 1st

• 2019
  • Congratulations, Mrs. SPLOT, It’s a Plugin After a longer than expected delivery period, the baby is breathing. Now it’s time for some folks to give it a tickle. There are two sites now running the very first versions of the TRU Writer SPLOT running completely as a WordPress plugin. This means rather than the functionality being coded into a child theme […]
• 2017
  • First Apple Pie of 2017 is explored Hello flickr explore, it’s been a while…. Perhaps you were hungry The thing is there’s not a whole lot to say about the photo. It’s a pie. It’s the first home made apple pie of 2017, as my tree has a pretty good amount of fruit on it. The recipe is not a family secret, […]
• 2016
  • Slicing Through the Water Knife I’m reading along side Bryan Alexander and others in his “near-future” science fiction reading “club” (is it a club? a group?). What does one do in a reading group? I guess you read! Outlining the reasons for joining along and the braided stream of connections to his choice of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife may […]
• 2015
  • Rinsed and Ready Wow, another in explore achievement for a photo I might have not picked myself. I thought this was happening when my phone starting pinging with a bunch of flickr likes from names I do not recognize. It makes me giddy, so I had to write the post now. Flickr does not tell you when they […]
• 2013
  • So You Want to Help Manage ds106 Radio? cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine I am going to assume the answer is “yes” “EFF YEAH I AM #4FLIFE” We still have some server quirks to try and figure out, like getting live stream meta data to display, and some indication of when a live broadcast is going […]
  • Building Out the [New] ds106 Assignment Bank It’s time to get all wide-eyed and get started on my August project- to recast the ds106 Assignment Bank into a wordpress theme that would have the functionality built into it for people to create other kinds of sites with the same features. The first step was to create the development site, which shall remain […]
• 2010
  • Going With the Flow Sometimes you have trips with very well defined and choreographed itineraries, where you know what is/should be happening down to some overly detailed level of detail. This week has not been one of those, it’s been more of going with the flow. And that’s ok. A planned trip to visit friends in Monterey was built […]
• 2009
  • Pretty Code After years of publishing snippets of HTML and PHP code in this blog, I’ve yet to find an elegant way to represent the code when published- there’s a bit of a trick, since you don’t want the HTML or PHP to do what it normally does. For a few years I have used the Preserve […]
  • View Source Messages One of my web hobbies is peeking at the source code of web pages– and I love it when you find something there that does not make the front page, and HTML Easter Egg if you will. I actually do this if I am trying to see how something was coded for a page or […]
• 2008
  • A Different Way to Make a Plugin While I tinker with them, I’ve yet to code my own WordPress plugin. There are so many to choose from! A few weeks ago I got an email from a guy named Joe who I had met at Northern Voice. He was developing a plugin that would connect blog posts automatically to related content in […]
• 2007
  • The New Polaroid is TypePad Can you remember the anticipation of counting to 60 before peeling back those Polaroid photos, juts hoping Aunt Maybelle was smiling or little Jimmy did not have his finger up his nose? The smell of the chemicals as it revealed what more often than not was not realistic colors? Is that how we do photos […]
• 2003
  • Onward to Vancouver for a Gulp of MERLOT Just a few days until I leave (Monday), heading northwest to beautiful Vancouver for the MERLOT 2003 conference. In addition to putting on a poster (and a completely unposter-like poster at that!) on the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX), I am teaming up with compadres Brian Lamb and D’Arcy Norman for a session covering our work […]

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 12 posts previously published on August 1st

• 2019
  • Congratulations, Mrs. SPLOT, It’s a Plugin
• 2017
  • First Apple Pie of 2017 is explored
• 2016
  • Slicing Through the Water Knife
• 2015
  • Rinsed and Ready
• 2013
  • So You Want to Help Manage ds106 Radio?
  • Building Out the [New] ds106 Assignment Bank
• 2010
  • Going With the Flow
• 2009
  • Pretty Code
  • View Source Messages
• 2008
  • A Different Way to Make a Plugin
• 2007
  • The New Polaroid is TypePad
• 2003
  • Onward to Vancouver for a Gulp of MERLOT

.

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.

---

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