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.

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.

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

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 13 posts previously published on November 10th

  • 2017
    • Dogfooding my Bigify Tool I’m vying in a contest on my own blog for least intelligible post title. The competition is thin. I introduced this word (and the same photo) (because at least people should enjoy the photo) in a talk this week on my approach of “doing it web style”. The audience had not heard the term dogfooding […]
  • 2015
    • You Fill My Sail To Brian Lamb, Yacht Rock borders on religion. Part mockumentary, it was a web video series that Brian has raved about for almost as I have known him. I won’t even try to explain it, leave that to Wikipedia. And to me shame, I’ve not watched it. That’s on my homework list; Brian has done […]
  • 2012
    • By Golly, There Are Files on my iPhone! One of the most frustrating aspects of Apple iDevices is the complete obscuration of the file system. We Have Been Judged Not Worthy of Having Access, in the name of ease of use. I’m find with this is the primary mode, but I know for a fact that within my decide is a file system. […]
    • Learning in 2012 A.D. “The future of education is now. This is the single biggest change is education since…” maybe the film strip? Giulia pointed me to a video clip on the Paleofuture site featuring what the future of education would like (from a vantage point of 1967). The full film, “1999 A.D.” was produced by the electronics firm […]
  • 2011
    • Road Stats: Week 21 cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of days on the road: 140 Miles Driven: 12,675 Most Recent 1000 mile marker: 12,000 miles, south of Atlanta, GA on October 30 Number of States/Provinces driven in: 24 Number of US/Canadian Border Crossings: 5 Status of #occupycanada: currently occupying! Money spent on gas: […]
  • 2010
    • It’s Not Really Sharing When the Default Is Not cc licensed flickr photo shared by Roberto Rizzato â–ºpix jockeyâ—„ Facebook resident Let’s stop politely nodding and play lip service to sharing content. Let’s stop doing sort of sharing, like sort of pregnant. You do or you don’t. And save the trotted our excuses, “most people don’t know about creative commons”, “the default is turned […]
    • Dental Quasi-Parable I so so much dig blog posts from Clay Burrell like his weaving a less than glowing Blackboard experience into a story The Tailor – A Parable. He pulls zero punches but also brings his point home in oblique creative ways. While I was pretty sure what a parable was, a check in was worth […]
  • 2008
    • Maybe Blogging is Dead After All (or our conceptualization is) Are Blogs Are Dead my photo of Nancy White’s graphic facilitation at Northern Voice 2008 (do I have to attribute by own photo? why not?) Lacking no editorial oversight beyond themselves and opinions of their 2 readers, one thing a blogger can do is change their mind. And back again. Last week I asserted, that […]
  • 2007
    • Took me Two Years To Stumble into This Just to prove I am really not as technical savvy or know it all about the web as some of you fools think; today I absently blundered into a nifty piece of Google tech that is, oh, about two years old. A bunch of people will comment, “Oh heck yes, I knew about that like […]
  • 2005
    • 3 Slopcasts I’m liking adding some audio recordings of our Ocotillo Online Learning Group monthly meetings to the notes. It should add value for people who cannot drive to a meeting. I’ve just posted the notes from our November 4 meeting about Testing Centers for Online Students. But we sure are not talking about high end ITConversations […]
    • Fixing the Feed2JS Clock I’ve been bothered by the issue of inccorect displayed time stamps for Feed2JS, so I diverted from a few tasks at hand to take a new approach. The MagpieRSS library has a nice function that returns the date/time stamp of any item, in its myriad formats and tag names, as one of those values of […]
  • 2004
    • Hey! Ease up on the Wiki Clicks! I might have been a bit premature to share the wiki links for my New Zealand workshops. Apparently the server here got rather overwhelmed with traffic, because it was pretty much unusuable during my workshops down south at Manukau Institute of Technology. At 10:00 am I was pretty much up the wiki without a paddle… […]
    • Kiwi Cereal flickr foto Weet-Bixavailable on my flickr The number one cereal for New Zealand is a giant Shredded Wheat. And you gotta love a food product from the folks at “Sanitorium”! More on New Zealand brands. I am talking all kinds of photos of signs, packaging, labels etc. Look at the size of that “bix”! You […]
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 13 posts previously published on November 10th

.

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)

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)

Profile Picture for CogDog The Blog
An early 90s builder of web stuff and blogging Alan Levine barks at CogDogBlog.com on web storytelling (#ds106 #4life), photography, bending WordPress, and serendipity in the infinite internet river. He thinks it's weird to write about himself in the third person. And he is 100% into the Fediverse (or tells himself so) Tooting as @cogdog@cosocial.ca

Comments

  1. Hi Alan,
    I’m pretty impressed too. Nice stuff on the options/params.

    Mine started as a page template and was stuffed into a plugin when someone on micro.blog was interested.
    I don’t see the stuff on admin, although I am using WP5 I’ve Gutenberg turned off?
    I didn’t notice the above post problem as I’ve nothing on the page, twas a bit quick & dirty.

    I look forward to digging into yours and learning a bit when I get a mo but that is not happening as much as I’d like.

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