Adding more old blog entries

Over the past few weeks, I've been adding more old blog entries: of the 599 non-recorded entries, I've so far entered 164. During this time, I've found myself adding additional tags to maybe 10% of those entries. I think that this is primarily because Blogger doesn't present an easy-to-choose-from list of tags: one can type the first letter of a tag and suggestions will be made, but this doesn't allow for the possibility of choosing a tag that exists but that I've forgotten about. I'm not going to update the online blogs but choosing tags for new blogs should be done by means of looking at all the tags in the blogs program. For example, I added a 'Greece' tag to blogs that were about Rodos, Santorini, Andros and Athens.

New ideas for the blog program: add a 'this day in history' button (in other words, display all the blogs that were entered on 30th October, regardless of year. This was quite simple, but first I had to see how Firebird refers to a day and a month that are contained within a date. The answer was slightly more complicated than how Priority refers to dates.

select * from entries
where extract (month from curdate) = 10
and extract (day from curdate) = 30

(in the program, 10 and 30 are replaced by parameters). This query is different from the dynamic 'where' statement that the program (and others of its ilk that I have written) uses, so pressing this button creates the query and executes it immediately, thus short-circuiting the normal code. For the record, there are at the moment four blogs for 30th October:

ID	Year	Title
771	2014	Another good idea
1181	2018	Losing an old friend, gaining a new one
1433	2021	Binaural beats and deep sleep
1543	2022	Adding more old blog entries

Of course, accessing these blog entries in Blogger is not very easy because Blogger doesn't allow access via id number. Presumably these entries also have different tags. My blog program does allow direct access: clicking on the entry should open Blogger with the correct blog entry, at least for those entries that have the address stored. There are about 930 than don't!

The next idea will be much more complicated and will involve programming something that is completely outside my comfort zone, or even my knowledge bank. In the past, I knew how many blog entries there were for King Crimson (15); with the improvements from about a month ago, I now know how many of these entries also have the Van der Graaf Generator tag (6) and how many don't (obviously 9). I also know how many VdGG entries don't have the KC tag (16). I would like to display this data in a Venn Diagram. Not only that, I would like that the size of the two circles, as well as the overlapping area, be relative to the number of tags.

This will give me something to do in my spare time!