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 February 22nd

• 2023
  • Small Screen Theory File this in the gut conjecture category, not grounded in anything beyond my failable non artificial questionable intelligence in my own grey matter (King, 1978). Plus, I am sure it is better crafted elsewhere. It’s no secret that my own practices and beliefs remain around this value of outloud outboard brain (tell-tale that this precious […]
• 2016
  • Meet Halle Gottfried… Meet Halle Gottried (pronounced MA-lee GAHT-fryd) on Facebook Fakebook WTFbook. Chief Engineer on an MSC (Mediterranean Shipping Company) container ship, he studied Engineering Science and Mechanics at Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences. When not on the high seas, he lives in New York City. According to someone he communicates with– I will call […]
  • The Catfish I Remember My fury over Facebook Catfishing was still simmering in the morning (I am far from done). And then, by some kind of weird sort of cosmic serendipity, the song I heard playing on my iPod (one of 4000+ songs randomly shuffled) was the sign Catfish by Bob Dylan. How is this even possible? I heard […]
• 2015
  • A Note on Locating Giphy Images From URLs In the process of making my last post I was compelled for reasons not work explaining to generate an animated GIF using as an overlay, the numbers display like in the movie The Matrix. I really do not need to link or embed that, do I? I did find what I was looking for searching […]
  • I Am Just a Number (740343) in the Twitter Matrix. Hello. I almost missed this tweet. User 740343 | @cogdog | Created Wed Jan 31 21:24:02 2007 — Every User (@Every_User_) February 22, 2015 With apologies to John Entwistle My name is 740343, And I’ve just become alive I’m the newest populator Of the planet we call Twitter Following the curiosity link for @Every_user I find […]
  • In 1983 AT&T Foresaw The MOOCtronic Blame Mike… https://twitter.com/holden/status/568875343165071360 How can I avoid such a calling? AT&T’s 1983 rollout of the Viewtron System and Sceptre Videotex Terminal hits it all- information overload, online shopping, banking, and school, all with majorly poofy hair, and maybe some of the best eyebrow raises in corporate video history and some background upbeat midi music that […]
• 2012
  • “In a World”… Do The Voice Long live Don LaFontaine… whose voice appeared in some 5000 movie trailers and 350,000 (? really?) commercials. You know him as soon as you hear him. Well, here is a new ds106 audio assignment for you, Use the Voice, bring The Voice to something around you: Don LaFontaine was legendary for hos deep voiceover intros […]
• 2010
  • Three D’s cc licensed flickr photo shared by Johnny Grim My noble plans to spend a week not blogging here and commenting on other blogs sounded pretty noble, but in execution? In a word, “meh”. I certainly succeeded on the first part, but managed at best, a few comments a day during a week of travel, overload, […]
• 2009
  • LiveScribed Northern Voice Presentation Nancy LiveScribed Me! by cogdogblog posted 22 Feb ’09, 11.25am MST PST on flickr Mucho gracias to Nancy White for using my new LiveScribe pen to record audio and graphic notes of my Say/Blog It With Pictures session at Northern Voice. The pen records the audio: cogdogblog.com/wp-content/audio/nv09.mp3 and in the micro-dot notebook synchronizes each pen […]
• 2008
  • Trackback Love At the Northern Voice Tiki party, Scott Leslie wowed us (well I was wowed) with his rendition of a poem only geeks could grok, called “Trackback Love”. I grabbed some video with my little Canon Powershot- the lighting is awful but the audio is not bad. Trackback Love (3.4 Mb Quicktime 1:42)  Share this barking […]
  • Twitter Works! Twitter Works! by cogdogblog posted 22 Feb ’08, 3.38pm MST PST on flickr Bill Fitzgerald exclaimed this after asking attendees at nrothern voice who had aspirin and Chris Lott tweete back, "me" People keep asking for how to use flickr or what its practical applications are. Bill Fitzgerald can now vouch that he was able […]
  • VoiceThreading Northern Voice How does one blog a blogging conference? However you feel like doing it! It’s Friday, time for Moose Camp at Northern Voice 2008 and I am convinced every conference should launch with a tiki bar party. So the Waldorf Hotel was packed with bloggers of all varieties. Got to hang out with Jim Groom, Chris […]
• 2006
  • Odeo, Duh I am quickly working up ideas for my Monday demo session on the “p-casting” word. Thinking about some of Cole’s comments desiring simplicity, I slapped my head in shock as I realize that Odea was a tool site I had known about, bookmarked, but had not really explored. Someone else can better summarize what it […]
  • Hey “No Cat”- Just What is Conversation? The notion of “distributed conversations” in blog space seems to rear its head on some cycle. It always seems to boil down to a polarization of those who find some level of comfort in the chaotic widely distributed notion and those that seem to covet the notion that it needs to be nicely organized in […]
  • Co-Co-Co-Co-Commenting I’ve been trying to use coComment, the tool that allows you to keep a record of your “distributed” blog conversations– by activating a bookmark when commenting elsewhere, coComment stores it on their site,a dn then submits it normally to the blog you are jabbering about. This way you can track conversations by visiting your coComment […]
• 2005
  • If All The Learning Objects Are Web Pages Who Needs a Repository? I’ve done a number of workshops demo-ing how to search various learning object “repositories” and invariably deal with the question, “Why don’t we just do a Google search?”. Strangely, having built one sort of similar system myself, I am asking the same question. Stephen Downes today shared the announcement of the Commonwealth of Learning’s Learning […]
  • Thinking Sideways About Web / Video conferencing Despite our best intentions, the cart named technology seems to often get ahead of the horse. In a recent meeting, one of our groups looking at new technologies made the usual strong case for looking at video conference technologies- better use of time, people not having enough time to come to development events, people not […]

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 February 22nd

• 2023
  • Small Screen Theory
• 2016
  • Meet Halle Gottfried…
  • The Catfish I Remember
• 2015
  • A Note on Locating Giphy Images From URLs
  • I Am Just a Number (740343) in the Twitter Matrix. Hello.
  • In 1983 AT&T Foresaw The MOOCtronic
• 2012
  • “In a World”… Do The Voice
• 2010
  • Three D’s
• 2009
  • LiveScribed Northern Voice Presentation
• 2008
  • Trackback Love
  • Twitter Works!
  • VoiceThreading Northern Voice
• 2006
  • Odeo, Duh
  • Hey “No Cat”- Just What is Conversation?
  • Co-Co-Co-Co-Commenting
• 2005
  • If All The Learning Objects Are Web Pages Who Needs a Repository?
  • Thinking Sideways About Web / Video conferencing

.

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)