Seeing as I’m committing to this little 200 crappy words per day project, I thought about how I can make things a little easier on myself when it comes to writing and publishing these posts (because why make things harder than they need to be).
As I mentioned yesterday, I’m adding “Previous day” and “Next day” links to the bottom of these posts to make it easier for readers to follow the train of thought between the posts. Now, I could just add these links manually or copy and paste from previous days. But then I thought, why not use my little friend TextExpander to do the heavy lifting for me?
Simply by typing “;200crappy” into the WordPress editor, I can paste the following code:
<blockquote>[tj_spacing_size="40"]<p style="text-align:left;"><a href="http://paulminors.com/%@-1D%Y-%m-%d">« Previous day</a><span style="float:right;"><a href="http://paulminors.com/%@+1D%Y-%m-%d">Next day »</a></span></p>[tj_spacing_size="40"]</blockquote>
A few notes on this code:
- The
[tj_spacing_size="40"]code is a theme shortcode that adds a little bit of padding before and after the links so that they’re nicely spaced on the page. - The
%@-1D%Y-%m-%dand%@+1D%Y-%m-%dTextExpander code in the URL’s inputs the date, but subtracts a day from todays date for the “Previous day” link and adds a day to the current date for the “Next date” link (this is why I chose to set the permalink for my post as http://paulminors.com/yyyy-mm-dd. - Obviously for today’s post, the “Next day” link won’t work (as tomorrow’s post hasn’t been written yet). But when I write tomorrow’s post, I’ll set the permalink for the post to the appropriate date, meaning the “Next day” link in this post will send people to tomorrow’s post without me having to go back and update this post.
So yeah…
That’s how I’m making things a little easier.
Go check out TextExpander. I use it hundreds of times a day. It’ll save you more time than you know.