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 22 posts previously published on October 21st

• 2021
  • Soup and Memory “Oh no, Granny! I must call you and apologize for not doing so on your birthday, last Friday… at least I made your split pea soup…” She would have been 116 that day — plus or minus as the story goes, October 15 was picked by a Census taker since Baby Janet lacked a birth […]
• 2017
  • 8 Characters of Code Saves SPLOT from Going SPLAT Plus hair tearing. Cussing. Going away from it and getting sleep. And some things you don’t learn from an Hour of Code. There is not heaps of science in my computing. I got a (polite) email request for help from Brian Lamb. He was seeing (and confirmed) error reports from the TRU Writer SPLOT, on […]
• 2016
  • Twitterless This is how it ends. DDoS attacks are hitting the internet that network that was supposed to be designed to withstand attack. Twitter, GitHub, are down, many other sites are fine (like this one). I sit here alone, contemplating a life of work based on the internet. Options… ? Top / Featured Image flickr photo […]
• 2015
  • Here is a Flickr Trickr Free tricks. If you have ever downloaded a flickr photo or come across in blogs a link to the image URL, it will be something cryptic like: 19172144641_71660f5fdb_z.jpg You have no idea who it belongs to, or where it lives in flickr. But there is a trick you can do to back out this info. […]
  • You Can’t Do A Selfless Selfie Alone As he does so well, Jonathan Worth turns the expected a bit inside out with his latest, inspired, phonar nation project, Selfless Selfies. The project aims to raise awareness for the plight of children affected by Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, a fatal disease lacking a cure. What is a Selfless Selfie? A campaign to raise awareness […]
• 2014
  • Gone Figuring I’ve flip flopped countless times on whether to publish this, and you may never know if the coin toss lands the last time on “no”. In fact, I bailed on it last night, but the damned thing keeps gnawing at me. I waver because it sounds a bit petty, defensive, and or combative. And it’s […]
• 2013
  • The Web Giveth (Again) Two summers ago I posted audio of my cousin Lorrie’s telling of her family story growing up a part of a carnival act. Her Dad, Billy Outten, was famous for his high dives, and the whole family (Lorries parents and her sister) performed as well. Outten’s big act was a “double fire dive” where he […]
  • Got My Digital Beard On cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine During my weeklong visit to Fairbanks Alaska I was fortunate to have met and been asked for a podcast interview with Chris Malmberg, who does this “Digital Beards” series for the University of Alaska Fairbanks eLearning and Distance Education group. Here I am […]
  • Headless ds106 Jumps… the Greek Donkeys Carrying Computers Shark jumping is so old. Everyone has done it. Try leaping over the Greek computer bearing donkeys cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Dave Sag I was trying to think of a ridiculous animal to be jumped, like an 8 headed iguana, and just flickr searching on “hydra” I landed […]
• 2012
  • ds106 Radio Rockumentary cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This audio recording was created (by request) for Matt Henderson a Manitoba teacher a number of us met this summer at the UnPlug’d Conference. Matt, who has done his own projects with creating a school based FM radio station, asked us for some help with […]
• 2011
  • Shhhh, I am talking about ds106 radio cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by rakkadeer I was locked into my spy mode, but had responded to DrGarcia’s call for audio clips to support the recent Schwartz Institute Seminar on DIY Radio : I was already on the run from the city and could not attend the session; sadly […]
• 2010
  • The Last Cowboy and a Truckload of Toilets What happened to brave men like Jake W. Burns? I found out tonight, watching my newest DVD, Lonely are the Brave (1962) which, IMHO is a completely under-rated classic. The tag line is “Life can never cage a man like this…” I watched it because, like the star Kirk Douglas, had enjoyed Edward Abbey’s The […]
• 2008
  • Linktributions Ahoy? Linktributions Ahoy? by cogdogblog posted 21 Oct ’08, 5.27pm MDT PST on flickr Are more people using "my made-up term? Will it some-day make it as a Word of the Year? (hah, down ego, down….) I got a nice little tweet from @eemann who discovered linktribution and Google now finds about 1400 instances— though I […]
• 2006
  • PicLens Photo Viewing Plugin I think this came via TechCrunch- PicLens is a web browser plugin that allows you to view photos form several services ( Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket) and image search results from Google, Yahoo, and Ask.com in a full screen mode, that keeps a record of images viewed (an icon strip below). Right now it is available […]
• 2005
  • Podcast Publishing With MovableType I’ve been tinkering with my simple approach of using MovableType as a publisher engine to create podcast feeds and content listings for audio content that is used across several different web sites. While there are many ways one could go about this, I am finding this to be efficient and fast. I only have about […]
  • How To Not Get Answers To Technical Questions I read a long time ago a column by an auto mechanic who said the hardest customers to deal with were ones who tried to guess what the car’s problem was rather than describe the symptoms, e.g. someone saying, “I think the hydrowidget is sheared off” rather than, “I hear a harsh squealing noise when […]
• 2004
  • Sometimes You Spend So Much Time and Effort Thinking of a Cute or Clever Title for A Blog Post That You Completely Forget What You Were Going to Write About It happens.  Share this barking on social media
  • EDUCAUSE 2004: “Learning Space Design” This session will explore learning space design principles as a way to enhance and transform teaching and learning with technology. The principles acknowledge changes in our understanding of student cognition and faculty roles in the learning process. Well-configured Learning spaces make it possible for faculty and students to engage in active learning, thereby enhancing learning […]
  • EDUCAUSE: “Sakai, A Collaboration Between The University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford, OKI, and the uPortal Consortium” Sakai is delivering an integrated open-source framework comprising an enterprise portal, a course management system, and a tool portability profile as a standard for writing future tools that can extend this core set of educational applications. Learn what Sakai has achieved and its direction for the future. http://www.sakaiproject.org/ My comments: If I recall, Sakai is […]
  • Disclaimer Eeek. It is coming to my attention via email, comments, trackbacks, server logs, that more people than My mom are reading this blog (actually she doesn’t know about it). Beyond scaring the ____ out of me, I felt it appropriate to say that my writing here is almost exclusively for my own uses, to track […]
  • EDUCAUSE Croquet Project This poster session demo was probably the coolest thing I have seen here at the EDUCAUSE 2004 conference. It is so cool I do not think I can describe it, See the Croquet Project WHAT IF… …we were to create a new operating system and user interface knowing what we know today, how far could […]
  • EDUCAUSE: “Surveying the Digital Landscape” (more back blogging from yesterday’s sessions at EDUCAUSE 2004): This presentation will provide a brief overview of various Evolving Technologies Committee white paper topics: the “consumerization” of information technology; strategies and best practices for addressing the growing concerns of spam, worms, and viruses; and the convergence of libraries and digital repositories learning objects for 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 22 posts previously published on October 21st

• 2021
  • Soup and Memory
• 2017
  • 8 Characters of Code Saves SPLOT from Going SPLAT
• 2016
  • Twitterless
• 2015
  • Here is a Flickr Trickr
  • You Can’t Do A Selfless Selfie Alone
• 2014
  • Gone Figuring
• 2013
  • The Web Giveth (Again)
  • Got My Digital Beard On
  • Headless ds106 Jumps… the Greek Donkeys Carrying Computers
• 2012
  • ds106 Radio Rockumentary
• 2011
  • Shhhh, I am talking about ds106 radio
• 2010
  • The Last Cowboy and a Truckload of Toilets
• 2008
  • Linktributions Ahoy?
• 2006
  • PicLens Photo Viewing Plugin
• 2005
  • Podcast Publishing With MovableType
  • How To Not Get Answers To Technical Questions
• 2004
  • Sometimes You Spend So Much Time and Effort Thinking of a Cute or Clever Title for A Blog Post That You Completely Forget What You Were Going to Write About
  • EDUCAUSE 2004: “Learning Space Design”
  • EDUCAUSE: “Sakai, A Collaboration Between The University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford, OKI, and the uPortal Consortium”
  • Disclaimer
  • EDUCAUSE Croquet Project
  • EDUCAUSE: “Surveying the Digital Landscape”

.

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.

---

Featured Image: My Photo Made the April Calendar flickr photo by cogdogblogshared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)