It turns out - yesterday on October 3d - my blog had a birthday - it was exatly one year since my first blog post appeared on reinisfischer.com
On that day I created 2 posts:
Speaking of the second (Can you blog 365 days in a row) post, that's what I said a year ago:
I think the answer is yes, you can. But still?
This question is more for me myself. Reason I'm asking this question is - when starting something new - it all seems so exciting, so adventurous. But then comes routine, especially for blogging thing - you see that results are not so great.
By saying results, I mean - statistics. I'm person who loves data, statistics, and it's hard to continue the work when there is bad or no results at all.
Well about results, we must ask ourselves (Or in this case, I must ask myself) what is the goal, we are trying to achieve? Is it truly huge amount of traffic? Or it's the quality of content we are giving away - knowledge sharing?
In theory it sounds - do, and everything else will come. So we must do small things (which is routine) and everything (huge traffic and recognition) will come.
The purpose of this blog article is not to try to prove that in 365 days I'll get huge amount of traffic. Purpose is to do small thing (blogging) everyday, so it became a habit.
Now - purpose of todays post is not about my goals and blogging habbits, but since I started to speak (celebrate) my first blogging birthday, I would like to mention - that I'm very happy and proud of myself - I managed almost completelty to blog everyday 365 days in a row (except there were 2 days - when I was on such place where there were no internet connection).
I even managed to attract some modest decent traffic and I actually I earned some money from blogging
So there are no regrets so far
Now - back on the subject
To celebrate my first blogs birthday - I decided to create a simple Drupal views block - to display nodes I wrote 1 year ago
Drupal views block - I wrote this 1 year ago
I'm displaying title, date and total views count
Basically - create a new view with block - add fields, style it if you wish.
To limit nodes for 1 year I'm using
Filter Criteria
Content: Post Date <= (is less than or equal) - 365 days (An offset)
Drupal Views Filter with Offset value
Save your view and a block to your theme
Now - there is another block I'm displaying on my themes sidebar - Related Items.
You can find an article here on how to create related nodes based on taxonomies
This time I decided to apply the same Filter criteria on related items as well - I don't wan't to show related nodes older than one year:
So here is my basic settings for that:
As you can see - I'm using two Post date Filter Criteria
- First one (<=now) is used to limit nodes that are not with the future dates (You can read an article here, how I'm using Drupal to schedule my posts in future)
- Second one (>= - 365 days) limits those nodes not older than one year
Hope this helps, and yes - first year in my active blogging career has finished - looking into coming years!
