Shire Reckoning
A WordPress plugin for rendering dates according to the Hobbit calendar, as explained in The Lord of the Rings, Appendix D
by Allyn Gibson · github.com/allyngibson/shire-reckoning · website
Install
No release zip yet. The repository archive installs, but the folder name will carry the branch suffix and updates will not flow:
wp plugin install https://github.com/allyngibson/shire-reckoning/archive/refs/heads/main.zipA WordPress Plugin for Hobbits with Blogging Habits
In the summer of 1999 I embarked on yet another re-read of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. For reasons unknown during that read-through I became incredibly enamored of the Hobbit calendar and how it worked. It occurred to me that I could write a simple BASIC program to take any modern date and render the date according to the Hobbit calendar. The end result wasn’t the most elegant program in the world, but it did what it needed to do.
Flash forward a few years. I’d begun my personal website, switched from GreyMatter to WordPress in 2004, and I saw that people were doing interesting things with plugins for the WordPress platform. I wondered, Could I write a plug-in to pull a date from the WordPress database and give the date according to Shire Reckoning? I went out, bought a book on PHP, and after about an hour’s worth of work I had created my first WordPress plug-in, Shire Reckoning. Two years later, I created a sidebar widgets version.
The plugin creates two new php fuctions. shire_reckoning gives you the Shire Reckoning date and only the Shire Reckoning date. shire_reckoning2 gives you the Shire Reckoning date and a “This Day in Middle-Earth,” best designed for the WordPress sidebar.
Alternatively, the plugin also implements a sidebar widget. You can drag and drop on the Widgets screen of your WordPress installation backend. No fuss, no muss.
There is not, at present, a Gutenberg block. This has never seemed block-worthy to me.