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 16 posts previously published on July 12th

  • 2023
    • No Sad Eyes For Reused Photo Number 300 Look at the pup’s photo. Why so sad, Kay? This flickr photo of you I took in 2014 while visiting your human, Richard Elliot, at his home in Auckland, has just been added to the home grown collection of my flickr photos that have been reused elsewhere. Maybe it’s boasting or self vanity, but discovering […]
  • 2021
    • Digital Structures: Institutions Abandon / Individuals Preserve I’ve already written this blog post! Shall I cite myself, ibid infinitum? But just to show as an example, in my previous post I was able to reference the 2018 Mural UDG Project I was part of. A few days ago that was not possible, and also on the digital chopping block was years of […]
    • Unconformities, the Wikicene Era, and the Wikidata Formation There’s no magic beyond my fervent clutch to the discarded in lieu of social media the fully functional tools of RSS and News readers. But I will perk up at a geological metaphor in a blog post. Thus it was Irwin Devries’s dusting off of the publish button on his blog with a great new […]
  • 2016
    • Looking for Stuff Here That Lands You in the 404 Zone For the sake of keeping it not found, it is so extremely unlikely (our Department of You Never Know restricts us from saying “never”) to find mention here of that new AR mobile back to retro 1990s game that you are much better putting your money on hell freezing over the Cubs World Series award. […]
    • i love to share — My CC Certification What If Video That photo is not only a favorite t-shirt, I’d like to make it my professional tag line. Well, maybe right after Defender of the Commons: To the people who defend our creative commons – I salute you 🙂@cogdog @mweller @amyburvall @dajbelshaw pic.twitter.com/7Js0ZSwDb1 — Bryan Mathers – @bryanmmathers (@BryanMMathers) May 12, 2016 The collection of videos […]
  • 2015
    • En México, Recordando a mi Abuela Today marks the calendar lap of my grandmother’s passing in 2003. “Granny” was a one of a kind person, to me as a kid she was the emblem of someone full of life, a sense of sophistication she was always go go go. Even if my perceptions were not true to life, I still adored […]
  • 2014
    • Image Bending in Audacity Trippy. The frames of this gif (image data) were edited in audio editing software. It’s in the realm of glitch art as the effects created are largely unpredictable. It’s a matter of saving an image in an uncompressed format, importing into Audacity, applying an effect or two, and exporting back again. I saw a link […]
    • The Day I Cried in a Canyon A tweet from someone (sorry there goes my weak citation) led my to Mike Wesch’s Learning Worth Crying About: For those of you who watched my most recent talk, Learning as soul-making, you know that I have become interested in moments of profound transformation and growth among students that I call “Learning worth crying about.” […]
  • 2012
    • Day 1: A Twister of a Daily Create Challenge I could not be more excited then to see all 36 drawings of tornados for the first day of the Seven Day Daily Create Challenge (and I realize my tweets and blog posts may be bordering on annoying in frequency, but hey, go take it up with my Drill Sergeants). I hope to see y’all […]
  • 2007
  • 2005
    • gCensus: A Tale of Two Cities If you have been blown away my zooming around Google Maps, the possibilities of combing that data with other data is starting to become wonderfully dizzying. Crime data and Google Maps. Housing and Google Maps. Well here is another one– gCensus nicely combines US census data and Google Maps. As you zoom and pan you […]
  • 2004
    • 3 Steves And a Blog I could not resist coming up with a cute name for a blogspace for Steve Gilbert, Stephen Ehrmann, and Steve Saltzberg, all with the TLTGroup (Teaching, Learning, Technology Group)- hence 3 Steves And a Blog. This started when I proposed to the Charles Ansorge, the current maintainer of the TLTGroup’s “Low Threshold Applications of the […]
    • FlipSite: 5, 6 years of Coin Flip Simulations I just cleaned up a bug in a golden oldie web site, and it is playing music again. The Interactive FlipSite was created so long ago I cannot remember exactly for sure, at least before 1998. The purpose was to create a site to illustrate simple probability for basic mathematics using the most simple of […]
  • 2003
    • Thanks IDBlog for Pointer on Adding Comments… Thankls to Beth Mazur and her post on IDblog: Spotlighting comments that had the MovableType code for adding the excerpts of the 5 most recent comments to this blog, now visible on the right under the heading “Others Bark Back” Just another small way to bring bits of information from within the weblog to the […]
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 16 posts previously published on July 12th

.

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)

If this kind of stuff has value, please support me by tossing a one time PayPal kibble or monthly on Patreon
Become a patron at Patreon!
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.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *