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 14 posts previously published on December 19th

• 2022
  • First Twittering Day Since I know not which will be last, I am doing my own archival work here. This was my first day twittering on January 31, 2007: This first day’s glorious messaging says so little about the future. Here is that fateful day, with tweets in chronological order: Looking at a long list of Cole’s twitterstwittering […]
• 2019
  • Browser Inspector as the New Goggles I’ve collected more than enough examples of Web Tools Biting the Dust but it stings more when the dust biting is by organization that believes that the internet “is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible to all.” Now in the queue for the next iteration of this video is Mozilla Goggles. […]
• 2017
  • Swapping Out Sputtering SPLOT Plugins I have grand SPLOT plans for the holidays. Huh? I hope to spend some time cleaning up a number of relatively minor issues with existing SPLOTs, maybe add a new one or two (I did say grand), update the Instant SPLOT recipes (and test them out more to troubleshoot some reported issues). It’s not too […]
• 2016
  • When You Stay in Neutral You Never Go Anywhere You get inside your car, turn the ignition switch, hopefully put on the safety belt, maybe turn on the radio or some kind of music player. The engine warms up. When you want to do, which gear to you put it in? A tad obvious, right? Within a few pages of Chapter 3 (“Ideas”) We […]
• 2014
  • Poetic Genius on The Other Path Some of most jaw-dropping breath-stealing moments are when I see/hear how someone has used a tool, medium I have had in my hands many times, and completely does something I never even imagined possible. Creating within constraints is some of the best stuff you can try. The other day, Bryan Alexander tweeted a link to […]
• 2012
  • Don’t Let a Scientist Talk You Into a Nuclear Powered Shaver The ds196 GIFfest is going wild! And a bunch are taking on the Muppets challange including @noispreofessor @timmmmyboy and Michael Branson Smith who launched this one. I like the Rodney Dangerfield Muppets, the ones who get no respect, and who gets less respect than Beaker? Bring on the GIFness!  Share this barking on social media
  • ds106 GIFfest It was two years ago when ds106 was born– and one of the most magical parts was the spontaneous combustion/eruption of people experimenting with new forms of animated gifs. With my semester of teaching ds106 ending and most others going more into goofy relax mode, I wondered about launching some sort of “event” just for […]
• 2007
  • Pulling AdSense from a Plain Domain This falls into the category of “curiosities raised from idle web wandering”. I just noticed after not looking at it for a while at how much stuff (or crud or crap) I have running down the sidebar of this blog. Its stuff I pretty much ignore, as likely do others. I do get some self […]
  • Pack the Moose! Moose Mugshot posted 30 May ’07, 4.18pm MDT PST on flickr We just spent a week camping up at Algonquin. It was wonderful, such a gorgeous wilderness and what wildlife! Woo hoo! I’m already planning to attend Northern Voice 2008 but now I am packing the good moose duds since my session on “50 Web […]
• 2006
  • Adios coComment I was a fence sitter on the value of coComment, which in theory allows you to track the comments you make on other web sites, blogs together. Interesting concept, yet often marginal execution, and today, frustration, as the browser wheel spun and spun and spun waiting for coComment to do whatever it does behind the […]
  • Free and Free and CC Many times I have said, er boasted, that pretty much form the time I started this ed tech computer work, I’ve made it a habit to give away, for free, just about anything I’ve made. I do believe it comes back to you. And it has, in the forms of invitations to visit some wonderful […]
• 2005
  • Blink Goes The Server Over the weekend our server light went dark. For most of the weekend, our whole Maricopa network was offline. There was no information actually communicated by our IT department, even after the fact. I only knew since our email server was not reachable, not our primary web server. Even after that, it took longer for […]
• 2004
  • Yawncasting I feel pretty much late to the dance with podcasting. It is a technology phenomnma that seems like it happened more or less while I was out of the country 3 weeks in November. My colleagues D’Arcy and Brian are all over it, and I have give high credence to things my trusted colleagues get […]
  • It’s Brown But Looks Awfully Familiar Imitation and flattery aside, just curious if anyone thinks RSS-to-Javascript bears any resemblance at all to our Feed2JS? I do not really care all that much since Feed2JS code is open source but some credit would be nice, egos can always use some stroking now and then… Ours was pretty much inspired by David Carter-Tod’s […]

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 14 posts previously published on December 19th

• 2022
  • First Twittering Day
• 2019
  • Browser Inspector as the New Goggles
• 2017
  • Swapping Out Sputtering SPLOT Plugins
• 2016
  • When You Stay in Neutral You Never Go Anywhere
• 2014
  • Poetic Genius on The Other Path
• 2012
  • Don’t Let a Scientist Talk You Into a Nuclear Powered Shaver
  • ds106 GIFfest
• 2007
  • Pulling AdSense from a Plain Domain
  • Pack the Moose!
• 2006
  • Adios coComment
  • Free and Free and CC
• 2005
  • Blink Goes The Server
• 2004
  • Yawncasting
  • It’s Brown But Looks Awfully Familiar

.

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)