In reply to Aaron Davis.

Aaron, apologies that I didn't write it directly into my post! I got sidetracked and spent some time editing my example (and a sketch of Colin's) into the On This Day page in the IndieWeb wiki instead of on my own site. I suppose I ought to figure out a way to own my own wiki edits on my own website and then syndicate them. I'll live with putting a syndication link into this post instead. (Wouldn't it be nice if the wiki sent webmentions to sites when the page updated?! But that's an itch for another day...)

In any case, you can see the details there, or I'll say here for the tape, that I'm using the the Room 34 Presents On This Day plugin for WordPress. It handles most of the heavy lifting though I'm considering tweaking the code a little bit for improving the display of widget portion. In general it has everything that I'd want an OTD plugin to have, so I'm quite happy with it otherwise.

There's another related plugin I added based on my search/research, but I wouldn't recommend it. Colin's code looked excellent and I particularly like the UI he's got for his particular front page, but I thought that the ability to have a widget as well as a stand-alone archive page would be even better. At least there are a handful of options to serve as a guideline for how one might attempt it as well as some pre-packaged ones that people can try for themselves.