On This Date

I add a custom WordPress plugin to the blog that displays date-related location data in the sidebar.

As I continue to work on filling in the gaps in this blog, I realized that most of the blog posts were published after the date the post covers — sometimes weeks or months (or years!) after it. I also realized that because I’m now filling in gaps, the posts are not in the order in which I completed my trip. In other words, it’s a bit of a chronological mess.

My goal is to build a site with useful information for other folks completing their Great Loop adventures. To do this best, I need to be able to present timely information. For example, it’s now late December — no one wants to read about my trip through the Trent-Severn Waterway this past summer. They want to read about places they might be coming up on in Alabama and Florida.

I realized that one way I could help folks find “current” information about my trip was to list the places I was on the current date. If I had a blog post about it, I could link to that post so it could be easily opened and read. Something like this:

What you see above is the results of a plugin I hired developer Brian Haskin to write for this blog. The plugin currently has just one job: at midnight (PT), it takes the current date and searches a database I prepared that lists all the days I traveled on the Great Loop, including the days I traveled with Captain Paul and Captain John. It then displays the date and location, no matter what year it was, and includes a link to any blog post I’ve written about it. I put this output in the sidebar of every page on this site so it can be seen and used.

So if you’re on the loop right now and wondering where I was today during my travels — since there’s a pretty good chance it might be somewhere near where you are — you can see a list in the sidebar.

And if I get my act together soon, a complete list in date order may appear below, right here:

But not yet.