frozen octopus

I have a long list of albums I am slowly getting through. They come from all over the place. People tell me suggestions, find suggestions in blog posts, find lists of albums, hear things when I am out and about using Shazam, etc.

I love the list, but sometimes current me and past me get out of phase with what I want to hear. There is stuff from a couple of years ago that is kind of head-scratching to me right now. It's got me ruminating on how to handle the list.

Currently, it's being sorted from oldest to newest. While that is clearing out the albums I added from earlier, there is a lot of "huh" happening. If I reverse the sort to recently added to oldest, then stuff is going to be buried under the sediment of newly added albums. A brainstorm is in order.

Brainstorm

• One new, one old: evenly chips away at both ends of the list
• One new, two old: a little bit of me now and clears out the past quicker
• Two new, one old: a lot of now but slowly moves the old end of the list along
• MWF: listen to recently added on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday
• M = old: have one day be the oldest albums
• Sun = recent Moon = old: this one is kind of tidal
• Decade = start with current decade and go backwards with each album

Half of me thinks either "two recent one old" or "MWF" would be fun. The second one is probably less thinking in the long run. The main point of all of this is having fun listening to music your own way.

Last weeks music I can remember by reading the name

• Pere Ubu Dub Housing #punk
• Mal Waldron Mal 2    #jazz

I wanted to make an "on this day in history" block to see if there are any interesting patterns with my music listening history. It is doable with a View block in Drupal with a little bit of setup. The block shows a list of albums that I listened to on today's date from every year in the past (5/15/2024, 5/15/2023, etc.).

You will be making a block with at least two contextual filters that look at the current month and current day. They will only allow content that match today's month and date. Setting up a block like this is excellent practice for working with contextual filters in Views.

Steps

Setup your View

Make a view with a block set to only show whatever content type you are posting (Page, Article, etc.).

Setup the Fields

Add whatever fields you want to display in your block. Title will work as a bare minimum.

Setup the Contextual Filters

You are going to create two contextual filters which is located in the Advanced area.

1. Select the filter for "Content: Created month" and click apply. Under "When the filter value is NOT available", choose Provide Default Value and set the Type to Current Date. Click apply this display.
2. Select the filter for "Content: Created day" and click apply. Under "When the filter value is NOT available", choose Provide Default Value and set the Type to Current Date. Click apply this display.

You should now have two Contextual filters:

• Content: Created month (Default: Current date)
• Content: Created day (Default: Current date)

Setup the Filter Criteria (optional)

If you are ok having this current year's posts in your block then skip this. If you need to NOT have posts from the current year in your block, you need to set up one more filter.

1. Add a new filter and choose what field you are using as a source for your date. Mine is "Content: Authored on".

• For the operator select "Is less than.
• For the value type select "An offset from the current time such as "+1 day" or "-2 hours -30 minutes"
• For the value, enter "first day of this year"
• For the granularity, select day.

Add the Block to your Site

Now you can place your new block wherever you want and it will show you a list of content from the current day.