Filed under Tolkien
Happy New Year!
In the Shire, anyway. 
If we were Hobbits, if we lived in the Shire, today would be the first day of the new year, the 2nd of the month of Yule.
Yule is a strange month. It’s only two days long. The first of Yule is the last day of the year. The second of Yule is the first day of the year. And the Hobbits have a winter festival called the Yule Days that lasts from 29 Foreyule (in other words, three days ago) to the 2 Afteryule (which is two days hence and corresponds with our Festivus).
Those Hobbits. They need to lay off the pipeweed, obviously. 
So go forth and party. Do festive things. Drink …
Filed under Tolkien
I fired up Opera this morning, looked at my own website, and there, in the sidebar, was the usual “this day in Middle-Earth” feature. And lots of things happened in Middle-Earth today.
A few years ago I wrote a BASIC program to convert Gregorian dates into Shire dates. No, I can’t tell you why — it seemed like a fun little project to work on, and one afternoon’s work later it was done. A few years later I took that BASIC program and rewrote it as PHP, and then turned it into a WordPress plug-in, and later a widget. Shire Reckoning has turned up on a number of WordPress-powered blogs.
Today is September 22nd, as Tolkien would put it, according to the …
Filed under Asides, Tolkien
Being the hot, miserable day that it is, I worked on a Word macro coding project for work I’d started (and finished–or at least got something that runs) last week, to clean up the code, strip out some redundancies, and replace a brute-force search-and-replace with a much cleaner looped search-and-replace.
And then, I turned my attention to something completely frivolous.
I wrote the “Shire Reckoning” procedure for WordPress into a Word macro. So, now, I can add the current Shire date to any sort of document.
I think I’ll turn my attention next to integrating it with a letter template I created and enjoy using. No, not the Sherlock Holmes letter template for MS-Word. I’m talking something else.
Hobbies. Could use hobbies.
Filed under Tolkien, WordPress
I’ve been asked if my Shire Reckoning WordPress plug-in would ever be available as a WordPress widget.
As of today, it is.
Installation is a snap. Download the .zip file. Extract the file and upload it to your widgets directory. Activate the Shire Widget plug-in. Then on your widget management screen, drag it to your sidebar.
No fuss, no mess, just the current date according to the Hobbit calendar and, occasionally, what happened on that day in Middle-Earth history.
Filed under Tolkien, WordPress
The strange little box in the sidebar is now fixed.
I’ve written my first WordPress plug-in.
As you can tell, it generates a date in Shire Reckoning. I’ve done this before, but as a BASIC program. Now I’ve rewritten the program in fairly simply .php code.
Interested parties may download the plug-in here.
How does one call the plug-in? I inserted the following code into my sidebar.php file:
<?php shire_reckoning(); ?>
It can take two arguments–’auto’ or ‘now. Now will give you the current date in Shire Reckoning. Auto can be used to replace the_date function with shire_reckoning(‘auto’) in your WordPress loop if you want to have your blog’s dates given in Hobbit terms.
Here’s my main page on Shire Reckoning.
