Coming up in a few days, me with a band of other DS106 Never Quitters, are on tap November 4 for a live conversation session for the Reclaim Open Conference – in that session sharing our love for and refusal to stop being part of the DS106 Daily Create aka The Daily Create (TDC).
In the spirit of historical research (hah) I started combing my archives, the Wayback machine, and other related links to get at a timeline for the Daily Create. In the vein of looking at history mapped by tree rings, I offer a Daily Create Dendrochronology plus a few more markers that are harder to see on the tree cut.
The Official TDC Reference Time
The reference date for this is first DS106 Daily Create, TDC1 published January 8, 2012. All dates forward, like the date of the session, November 4, 2025, are referenced in TDC time, how many Daily Create Days after as TDC5044. By the same convention, all dates before are how many Daily Create Days before e.g. the first time I met Jim Groom in person was TDC(-1696) which was May 17, 2007 at Faculty Academy at UMW or my first blog post at CogDogBlog was TDC(-3185) or for those unable to do the math, April 19, 2003. Note the use of parentheses to indicate Time Before TDC.
I made a little Google Sheet to run these calculations; I guess I could have made a little web page tool with some JavaScript to do the work, but in the end, the same thing.
And just for fun, and for No Great Reason, I decided to put some key history moments on a scale of history known by trees, which record time one ring a year– and just for fun, I made this as an H5P Hotspot. This is not everything, but key points in history, plus one for every 1000th TDC (we are past five of those)
(-TDC782) The Daily Shoot
To go back into negative TDC time (-TDC782) is to go to the core, it’s inspiration technically, the Daily Shoot a site created by pro photographers James Duncan Davidson and Mike Clark with the idea:
Photography is an art and a craft. Getting better at both requires practice. Lots of practice. Daily practice if you can manage it. Sometimes, more often than we’d like to admit, it can be hard to pick up the camera and start using it. Usually when this happens it’s not that you don’t want to make a photograph, but more like you don’t know what to go shoot or where to get started. You just need a little inspiration… That’s where @dailyshoot comes in.
The Daily Shoot is a simple daily assignment designed to encourage you to pick up your camera, get out there, and make some photographs!
Dailyshoot description, available in oldest Wayback Machine archive Nov 24, 2009
The way it worked was clever- the website published a new challenge each day, but at the some time it announced this on a strange site called “Twitter” where you could “follow” @daillyshoot each day seeing the newest challenge. The clever part was, if you replied in Twitter with your photo taken as a response and included each assignments hashtag (starting at #ds1), the web site aggregated the responses so you could see everyone elses.
In my own twitter archives, I found I am pretty sure I replied to D’Arcy Norman who shared the Daily Shoot in this platform around TDC(-744) Nov 24 2009 as I see a “tweet” I posted in that time range. It makes sense as in 2008 I had copied D’Arcy in the general daily practice of posting a photo a day to flickr, (a practice I have continued over the past 18 years and D’arcy still does his on his blog).
Why do a second daily photo challenge, that’s even more work! The powerful thing about the Dailyshoot was it gave you small thing ti look for, nit just trying to find anything interesting, but a task like “Wherever there’s an edge, there’s energy. Make a photo where two things meet: land-water, land-sky, etc. #ds77” or “Make a photograph that features a shadow as your subject today. #ds579”
But also as that day was the first Dailyshoot reply I also added to flickr (that was a good habit, I have a flickr album of the 472 photos I shared to the Dailyshoot, about 2/3 of the total they issued before pulling the plug. I had a photo editing flow in managing my photo edits in Apple Aperture, using a plugin to upload to flickr, tagging, and organizing photos into albums. Once a photo was in flickr I had decided to be used for the Daily Shoot, there was a button to “tweet” that photo. Smooth, operator…
(TDC-686) DS106 And the Daily Shoot
In the first iteration of DS106, the one Jim Groom offered 2010 for students at University of Mary Washington, the week on photography included a Daily Shoot assignment issued (TDC-686) or February 10, 2010. It was a natural appeal for the class as it gave students some practical photography methods/approaches to apply, but was also open to how they responded.
It rolled its way into the first open DS106 that launched in January 2011. All was groovy and “Twitter” was a joyful happy space on the Dailyshoot– until the dark day of TDC(-94) or October 5, 2011 when Davidson and Clark posted on the dasilyshoot.com blog (dead) that they were throwing in the towel after the last Daily Shoot, “Make a photograph that illustrates technology today. #ds689”
The blog post where they announced is gone, but there is a mention in the Daily Shoot flickr group’s discussion
Just a quick note to say that Mike and I are mothballing the Daily Shoot site. It’s been fun, but as you know there were things that needed to be worked on, and the time’s not there.
More on my blog: duncandavidson.com/blog/2011/10/dailyshoot_retired
Duncan
Dailyshoot flickr discussion group post
After the Demise of the Daily Shoot: Getting to TDC1
The news definitely rattled up the conversations in that “Twitter” place. My archive can zero in on month and year, but doesn’t have exact dates, and is also just my side of the conversation. Because twitter at the time did have RSS feeds I did suggest putting FeedWordPress to work and also, I see now suggested it as a “Daily Create” not just photos.
In October 2011, I was about three quarters the way through my long “Odyssey” travel around the US and Canada. I had visited Jim and the DTLT in Fredericksburg in early October- it looks like on October 11 I was heading to Ashville NC. So I was not spending a lot of time working on web sites. Plus between the end of that long trip I was headed back to Fredericksburg as I was signed up to be working right there with the UMW crew.
Luckily Time Owens stepped and came up with a beautiful and working approach for the New Daily Create site- as he blogged it himself Building the Daily Create
And then I realized I was making things too difficult. I’m not a programmer, I’m more of a “hack away at something and make it work” type of guy. In the end The Daily Create is very simple in how it works. I’ll break it down here for anyone else that wants to build a similar site, as I’m sure the idea of pulling in visual and audio content based on tags has a lot of potential for a lot of people. Here’s the nuts and bolts that make it work.
https://blog.timowens.io/building-the-daily-create
Along with Jim’s post I published my own take on TDC1
And thus the site was off and running at tdc.ds106.us (not online any more but in the Internet Archive) with TDC1 started January 8, 2012 with the challenge “Create a photograph that features a repeating pattern”. Jim and I were teaching in parallel DS106 classes at UMW and the Daily Create was a big component.
TDC991 Handing Over the Daily Create Keys
Thus off it ran. And kept on going. I took over the helm of keeping the daily content posted in early 2012 right into October 2014. At that time I was getting ready for a long stay at Thompson Rivers University, where Brian Lamb had organized (along with the great Irwin Devries) a 5 month fellowship for me. I sought to dial back my ds106 focus and solicited Mariana Funes who along with her “Gifadog” was one of the active open DS106 crew. I got her to sign up to take care of tending the Daily Create site.
Included in this post was a video overview of the “management” side of the Daily Create
but also some premonition:
I still have some grandiose plans to recast the Daily Create as a generalizable WordPress theme like I did for the Assignment Bank. The grand plan is that responses would not be via media sites like flickr, Soundcloud, YouTube; they would be submitted via a tweeted link.
It just might happen.
https://cogdogblog.com/2014/07/behind-the-scenes-daily-create/
And indeed it did, an early post documented the first version of the “Daily Blank” a souped up WordPress templated theme that had a trial run at TRU as part of the whacky version/flavor of DS106 Brian and I did as The You Show– a daily challenge we called The You Show Daily but absolutely it was the DS106 Daily Create in a new dress.
TDC1335: The New Daily Create Site Goes Live
So it was not until TDC1335 also known as September 4, 2015 that the “new” Daily Create site went live, pretty much the one you see today as Welcome To Our New House, Show Us a Neat Place. This was an homage back to the Daily Shoot, as it worked in the same way. A ket feature was new Daily Creates could be made by the site owner, but also a system was in place for public contributions that went into a holding pen. Either way, the theme took care of scheduling the next daily create 24 hours from the last one scheduled in the queue.
New challenges were posted to the web site each day (scheduled post) and at the same time, via RSS and a service like dlvr.it posted to twitter with a custom hashtag for that day. Any replies or posts in twitter to the official account and including the hash tag, was snagged back on the web site as a “response”.
Other benefits was an ability to create a Leaderboard for a specific time or for all time (@ronald_2008 taking the top prize) -plus each twitter account could have its own link for responses. Mine is gone except for a count since I zapped my account, but see @mdvfunes for a living (haunted?) example.
And technically the Daily Blank WordPress theme was maybe second SPLOT (screenshot shows a demo with on TDC1042 or November 14, 2014) but the first that had a real use/need. I put it into play on a few projects of my own or helped others get their own started.
- The You Show Daily started for The You Show at TRU on TDC1101 or January 14, 2015 (53 dailies in total)
- The UDG Agora Daily Try started UDG Agora project on TDC1236 or May 27, 2015 (258 dailies in total)
- The Daily Stillness by Mariana Funes for The Stillweb on TDC1271 or July 1, 2015 (3108 dailies in total)
- Una foto cada dia by Antonio Vantagiatto for his INF115 course on TDC1475 or January 22 2016 (509 dailies in total)
TDC4147 End of the Twitter Line
The clouds were already looming for what was to come with the take over of “Twitter” by the Dark Lord Whose Name Shall not Be Uttered. Technically the API that enabled the Daily Create to track all the replies made in the platform was unplugged on TDC4051 (Feb 9, 2023) when access to the API disappeared. Actually it did continue to work, until TDC4147 or May 22 2023 which marks the last reply in twitter that appeared in the web site as a “response”, the last one published visible on the Responses listing.
It looks like Ethan Young has that last Tweet standing honor, last in a line of 32944 responses tracked since,TDC1335 September 2, 2015.
It’s not like the Daily Creates stopped, they continued on non-stop. What was lost was the ability to pull in replies and an easy way for participants to share theirs.
TDC4497 Daily Create Goes Federated
The Twitter writing on the wall as earlier for me, and I started poking around to try to move the Daily Create features to Mastodon. At TDC3972 (Nov 22, 2022) I had worked out a way to post the new TDCs using an IFTTT approach from the RSS feed and at about the same time of the Twitter API annihilation well I was doing some experiments with trying to fetch replies via the Mastodpn API.
I did not get much further, life and other stuff happening in the way. It was good I waited because the optimal approach (I hope) came with starting up the Daily Create with the WordPress ActivityPub plugin.
This all came to be at TDC4497 or May 6 2024 when the first Daily Create was posted via its federated account `@creating` for a challenge of What’s something you always wanted to do as a child but were never able to do? 0f course, as a child I wanted to be federated but never could.
You can see how it works as replies in Mastodon show up like comments, here on TDC4830 https://daily.ds106.us/tdc4830/#comments.
TDC6000s?
Our Reclaim Open Session happens on TDC5044 or Nov 4, 2025 with this challenge: “Are you feeling discombobulated? Worry not, we have the solution” which is well on the way to 6000. There’s still much I would like to improve on the site, it does not really keep track or counts like before the Twitter demise, and there is still references even to “tweets”. And maybe it will get a more modern theme.
Maybe.
Regardless, the Daily Create will just keep going. And there is no time like today to get started.
Bonus The Full Every Updating Daily Create Archive
Just because it seemed worth doing, I am also announcing here at the bottom of a Long Scrolling Post, a bonus feature for only the die hard TDC fans- a Google sheet archive of all Daily Creates, from TDC1 to TDC(today). It includes date, title, and a link (TDC1-TDC1334 go to Internet Archive copies).
But it is self updating. I am using a bit of magic I will present on my Wednesday Reclaim Open session on Small Pieces Still Loosely Joined, Integrated, Federated. From the Daily Create’s RSS feed, I have a gizmo set up in Make.com to add each new Daily Create to the spreadsheet.
Now stop reading this flaff and do today’s Daily Create!
Featured Image: Daily Create logo superimposed on Tilia tomentosa coupe MHNT.jpg Wikimedia Commons image by Roger Culos shared under a CC BY-SA license so as such this image is sahed the same.
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