Alan Levine recently posted his description of how to add an overview to your blog of postings from previous years on the same date as today. He turned it into a small WordPress plugin, allowing you to add such an overview using a shortcode wherever in your site you want it. It was something I had on my list of potential small hacks, so it was a nice coincidence my feedreader presented me with Alan’s posting on this. It has become ‘small hack’ 4.
I added his WP plugin, but it didn’t work as the examples he provided. The overview was missing the years. Turns out a conditional loop that should use the posting’s year, only was provided with the current year, thus never fulfilling the condition. A simple change in how the year of older postings was fetched fixed it. Which has now been added to the plugin.
In the right hand sidebar you now find a widget listing postings from earlier years, and you can see the same on the page ‘On This Blog Today In‘. I am probably my own most frequent reader of the archives, and having older postings presented to me like this adds some serendipity.
From todays historic postings, the one about the real time web is still relevant to me in how I would like a social feed reader to function. And the one about a storm that kept me away from home, I still remember (ah, when Jaiku was still a thing!).
Adding these old postings is as simple as adding the shortcode ‘postedtoday’:
There are 2 posts found on this site published on March 18
- March 18, 2020
- Fraidy Cat, a New RSS Reader A few weeks ago Kicks Condor released a major update of his Fraidycat feed reader. Like Kick Consor’s blog itself, Fraidycat has a distinct personality. Key with Fraidycat is that it aims to break the ‘never ending timeline’ type of reading content that the silos so favour to keep you scrolling, and that most feed […]
- Danish Open Data Extension and Impact Growth Last week the Danish government further extended the data available through their open data distributor, and announced some impressive resulting impact from already available data. In 2012 the roadmap Good Basic Data for Everyone was launched, which set out to create an open national data infrastructure of the 5 core data sets used by all […]
Thanks again for being an early trier if the plugin. I’m not quite sure what the difference was, perhaps the context of the query loop being different in a sidebar. As long as it works things are good.