Slowing Down a Daily _____ Site

It can take a lot of [insane?] effort to publish something like the DS106 Daily Create every day, but there seems to be enough hands on the wheel to do it daily.

I’m not sure where or who did the asking, but I recall being asked if the Daily Blank theme it uses could be set to maybe doing a new challenge at a less than daily frequency. As usual, the answer is “yes” — especially as a current project crops up with a need, I go into action.

This is coming up for the version I set up for the Ontario Extend Dailies. We’ve been in a “pause’ mode for a while, especially as we are currently running these as “Small Stretches” inside the mOOC currently running. We have been adding a new stretch there every other day.

But the plan all along has been to push these back out to open spaces, to “Escape the mOOC” (Terry and I keep back channeling about an Escape from New York motif).

It actually turned out to be very easy to add a new option to the theme to make a Daily _____ site …. slow down, to offer publishing frequency of less than every day.

Now you can have dailies published less frequently than every day (thus messing up the name of the theme, but, SHRUG)

All this mean is that when you create a new Daily item, it can either make it scheduled either days (or 1 week) after the last published one.

It turned out really simple to add as a feature. The new option just stores as number of days for the scheduling, with the default being 1 for pushing out the schedule every 1 day, but can be nudged to do 7 days for a weekly frequency.

	// first do offset  (every X days)
	
	$daily_offset = 3600 * 24 * dailyblank_option('frequency');
	

	/* if it's been more than 24 hours since the last published daily blank, 
	   set the next date to be on the  day after current; otherwise, set the 
	   next one to be 24 hours after the last published one.
	   
	   Factor in offset for less frequent than daily
	*/
	
	$next_dailyblank_date = ( ( time() - $last_dailyblank_date ) > 3600*24) ? strtotime('today+' . dailyblank_option('dailytime') ) + $daily_offset :  $last_dailyblank_date + $daily_offset;

// first do offset (every X days)

$daily_offset = 3600 * 24 * dailyblank_option('frequency');

/* if it's been more than 24 hours since the last published daily blank,

set the next date to be on the day after current; otherwise, set the

next one to be 24 hours after the last published one.

Factor in offset for less frequent than daily

$next_dailyblank_date = ( ( time() - $last_dailyblank_date ) > 3600*24) ? strtotime('today+' . dailyblank_option('dailytime') ) + $daily_offset : $last_dailyblank_date + $daily_offset;

And BOOM! Your site could do challenges every day, every 2 days, every 3 days, every week…

Hickman — public domain image from the Library of Congress

I’m pretty sure I am the only person who actually uses this theme, but in theory, anyone could change the beat of the drum for the band of a daily/every other day/weekly challenge site.

And “slow down” invariably makes me remember the driving license test scene from Taxi.