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.

This is the first day of the new season on this blog. This new season is me opening up old blogs posts from this day in the past that are stored in text files, adding them to this site retroactively, reviewing them, and learning from them, and staying on nodding terms with past me. 

I went to my folder of past posts from 2011 and the was only one post on 05/15 for all the years. That post happened in 2022. There was only one word...

"tech"

I am not even going to try to sort out that mystery. ( @ _ @ )

Before moving my blog to Drupal, this site, I was using a platform called Blot. I loved Blot because I would write a post in a text editor, tag it, Hazel would move it to a folder in Dropbox, and it would publish itself. It was magical. Before that, I was using something else (probably Blogger). Anyways, I have a lot of random blog posts in backups and text files lying around.

It is a minor annoyance mostly because there is a ton of music I listened to that I want to remember. Yet I don't want to read a bunch of my history because I am more of an in-the-moment or looking forward type. So I keep kicking the task of getting the music into this site down the road.

Yesterday i read a quote from Joan Didion Slouching Towards Bethlehem that made me want to tackle the task of getting things into here.

"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not."

The whole passage that came from is even better. You should go check it out.

That made me think that I need to just get all the old posts into here little by little. Each day, go through the past years and add that day to the blog. Get the past albums I listened to into here. Look for old things I wanted to do and see if they can be done easily now. See if there are any patterns like "I seem to always think the same thing on 05/14" or anything else. Mainly, try to make looking back enjoyable while I get things all in one spot.

Weird that was such a hard decision but I already feel a little lighter which rules.

When iPods and iTunes were first released, playing music on shuffle was my default. I can't remember the last time I have done that. I seem to remember there was a point around 8-10 years ago where I would push shuffle and eventually I would hear a song I heard the day before. I got frustrated so I switched to listening to full albums and haven't looked back.

Then by not pushing shuffle, albums I wanted to hear started piling up and I haven't been able to catch up since. Not bashing on shuffle. Just noticing a change. 

This last week's music that stuck out. I seem to keep going back to Eric Dolphy a lot lately. I don't know how that Dave Brock album got on my list but that one stood out for sure.

• Raskovich Varie Atmosfere Da Interni #soundtrack   
• Eric Dolphy Far Cry #jazz
• Dave Brock Earthed To The Ground #electronic
• The Bar-Kays Soul Finger #Soul
• Eric Dolphy At the Five Spot, Vol. 1 #jazz

I am starting to become devout about using lead-ins for the morning writing brainstorm mind-clear I do daily. Things come out slow when I sit down to a keyboard and try to get all the things out of my brain.

But if I use a lead-in to start a phrase and use it over and over, words pour out of my head. They probably let my mind get up to speed before making the jump to the thought. The repetition is soothing as well.

Examples

• "My day looks like I need to..."
• "I don't know but..."
• "Today I need to..."

If the thing I need to do or remember is a cymbal crash, then the lead-in would be the drum fill leading up to it.