I’ve been keeping a diary for around two years, which has around 500 entries at the time of writing. Not all are contemporary – I’m also using it to record specific days that I remember well in the past (for example, when I had a bad caving accident in 1989).

When a blog is also a diary, there are some interesting ways to present content in ways that are easier to navigate. For example, the year 2025 is shown as a photo gallery and browseable by month or topic. Each entry is display in ascending date order here – I think if someone wants to look at Feb 2025, it makes most sense to start at the beginning of the month.

However, I was also looking for a more serrendipitous way to re-surface old entries. I came up with “This week in”, where I put some cards at the bottom of every post which show posts from that same week in different years.

This arrangement has a couple of nice consequences. First of all, the most recent posts have entries from exactly one, two or more years ago. This means when I write new entries every week, I get to see some entries from the recent past that I had probably forgotten about.

But the second element of serendipity concerns surfacing posts from the very distant past. So, this entry from 12 December 2023 might show that same week in 2024, or it might throw up this entry from 1980 when John Lennon was shot.

This function was written in wordpress with extension help from DeepSeek AI. Just another example of how useful AI is to remove the drudgery of coding ideas once you have dreamed them up. I iterated several times, very quickly, through a few layouts and presentations before I settled on this one.

If I had to code it from scratch, without assistance, then it would have taken much, much longer, but I’d probably have stopped on the first version that worked “just good enough” as by then the excitement of a new idea would have been crushed by the reality of coding it.