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 17 posts previously published on April 18th

• 2021
  • A Tiny Tool for Google Image Searches set to Creative Commons My search history may indicate otherwise, but I feel like on a daily basis I am poking in Google Images for results licensed Creative Commons. I use one nifty trick to hasten the search, but just made another one that might be of use. The method I have used for quite some time goes back […]
• 2016
  • Getting, Gitting, or Goating with GitHub I’m hardly the first person to ponder ways to use the software collaboration site GitHub in a context outside of software development. There’s been a series of Chronicle of Higher Education pieces on “forking the syllabus”. There is Gitbook as a front end for using the approach for writing books. While I have used GitHub […]
• 2014
  • When Worlds Collide (2014) See the movie synopsis in the article in FakiPedia When Worlds Collide is a 2014 OER14 presentation based on the Fall 2014 headless ds106, co-presented by Rochelle Lockridge, Mariana Funes, and Alan Levine. The presentation was created in Keynote, and the animated GIFs tricked out by Rochelle and perhaps the paper may be published in […]
• 2013
  • The Book That Time Forgot cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I finished a book recently. One of those old style piles of paper bound in between thicker compressed fibers. I grabbed The Caspak Trilogy by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first 9and title on the spine) being The Land That Time Forgot (also available from […]
  • Again, Apple’s Change of Interface Rrquires Another $20 Piece of Plastic to Make it Work cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog The cable end with the black tape is what goes into my Alpine stereo deck in my truck. When I got my iPhone5, with the smaller interface "Lightning" port, using it to connect to my deck (There is a standard USB port from the unit- STANDARD) resulted […]
  • How Do You Think Yoda Got So Wise? Why he read all of the ancient and modern parables of the Wise One, especially borrowing attributes of those who took on Empires, like Jedi Yallow, for later training. He than sought out The Boing Boing Being in the deep depths of Hainault Forest, spending weeks at his feet, taking notes on his iPad. This […]
• 2012
  • There’s An App for Not Learning to Do That By removing the creative process and leaving only the results of that process, you virtually guarantee that no one will have any real engagement with the subject. It is like saying that Michelangelo created a beautiful sculpture, without letting me see it. How am I supposed to be inspired by that? (And of course it’s […]
• 2010
  • The Seven Circles of Canon Rebate Hell In which a large corporation beats me down by ambiguous instructions, rude representatives, and hiding customer relations…. Canon has $200 of my money and they refuse to give me what is mine. Having tried multiple times to comply with unclear instructions to process a rebate, they are holding onto my cash. I want it back, […]
• 2009
  • Everyone was HBO (Here Before Oprah)? Fail. C’mon twitter people, you are liming up zombie lemmings marching off the cliff. I see a stream of people in my stream tweeting something from a site boasting that they were in twitter before @Oprah. Monkey see, monkey click, monkey tweet. So there is a simple box on the site http://herebeforeoprah.com. In theory, you enter […]
  • Smokin’ Yahoo Pipes cc licensed flickr photo by Wade from Oklahoma … in which the technology blog author bares his ignorance by discovering a tool that is several years old…. With a new sense of urgency, I implore that some big web company buy and save Yahoo– if not just to preserve the most valuable important vital web […]
  • Use Gmail Web Clips as RSS Feed Ticker If I was tweeting this, I might make up a silly hash tag like #CoolNewTechnologyIJustFoundThatsBeenOutForEons I use Gmail extensively, got my CogDogness, as well as over the last few weeks, I have ditched the desktop email client and using the Gmail version of our NMC Google Apps email. By finding my oldest Gmail message, I’ve […]
• 2007
  • The Flat Classroom Horizon Project Doh! Sound of blog remorse! In writing about the CNI Horizon Project presentation, I was remiss in leaving out one of the coolest discoveries — that Vicki Davis (coolcatteacher in georgia) and 4 other secondary school teachers in Austria, Bangladesh, China, and Australia are doing another fabulous Flat Classroom project — and this one they […]
  • Twitter Cycle Have you heard just enough plaff about twitter the 2007 web love child? I have experienced and seen enough others experience the twitter cycle: “That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard of… who in their right mind would be doing that?” “Okay… if Xxxxxx and Yyyyyyy think this is cool, I will give […]
  • Horizon Report Presented at CNI Yesterday was a eventful day at the CNI Spring Task Force Meeting. My travel arrangements for this conference were pretty tricky — I got in my truck and drove 20 miles downtown to Phoenix. No lost luggage. This was my first ever attendance at a CNI conference; a different flavor of colleagues, so I got […]
  • I Think He’s Turning (Japanese, Chinese?) Found via an inbound ping: It looks like Stephen Downes is writing in new new tongues – http://www.edu2do.com/oldaily  Share this barking on social media
  • Flight of the [Arizona] Bumblebee Bumblebee posted 3 Sep ’06, 6.10pm MDT PST on flickr In the real life can be strange too department… We’ve recently been helping my mother-in-law clean up her cluttered yard and garage. She offered to let us take about 3/4 of a cord of firewood she had purchased for her small outdoor fireplace, and we […]
• 2004
  • Happy Blog Day To Me… Holy Calendars, Batman! April 19 marks one year to the birth of CDB, starting from first post, “I Blog Therefore I Am…” In one year, there have been 347 posts, 341 comments (probably 1000 more spam-ments caught my the MT Blacklist plugin), and likely 678 typos. Do the math. It has been interesting to see […]

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 17 posts previously published on April 18th

• 2021
  • A Tiny Tool for Google Image Searches set to Creative Commons
• 2016
  • Getting, Gitting, or Goating with GitHub
• 2014
  • When Worlds Collide (2014)
• 2013
  • The Book That Time Forgot
  • Again, Apple’s Change of Interface Rrquires Another $20 Piece of Plastic to Make it Work
  • How Do You Think Yoda Got So Wise?
• 2012
  • There’s An App for Not Learning to Do That
• 2010
  • The Seven Circles of Canon Rebate Hell
• 2009
  • Everyone was HBO (Here Before Oprah)? Fail.
  • Smokin’ Yahoo Pipes
  • Use Gmail Web Clips as RSS Feed Ticker
• 2007
  • The Flat Classroom Horizon Project
  • Twitter Cycle
  • Horizon Report Presented at CNI
  • I Think He’s Turning (Japanese, Chinese?)
  • Flight of the [Arizona] Bumblebee
• 2004
  • Happy Blog Day To Me…

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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)