Before/after post inclusion dates

Oh I hadn’t noticed, good point!

Right, the code is actually comparing the posted date to the BEGINNING of the days specified. So if you request “After 2020-01-03 and before 2020-01-04” it’s actually looking for “After start of day 2020-01-03 and before start of day 2020-01-04”, ie, only posts from 2020-01-03. So it’s really “After and on”, but “Before” is accurate… So something needs fixing.

Which do you think would be more intuitive:

1. including items from the date specified (ie change “Posted after” to “Posted on or after…”, and “Before” to “Posted Before or on”),
2. or excluding the date specified (leave the labels the same, just make them work as described)?

I think I just wanted posts from a specific date, I would probably prefer the first option, as I could just enter that date for both “Posted on or after” and “Posted before or on”; whereas if it were the other option I would need to specify “Posted after {the day before}” and “Posted before {the day after}” which seems unnecessarily involved.

Thoughts?

Ah, it’s not just me then. Yep, I think option 1 would work with those clearer descriptions. That’s consistent for both ends of the range so should be easy for people to get their head around without making any assumptions.

Another idea I had before reading your post (probably not necessary now) was to have the date selection options with minimal explanation e.g. before and after. Then when you make your choices it spits out a summary of what will be included if you proceed with those settings. You’d then have to confirm that this is what you want or make an adjustment before finally pressing submit.

Like I said, that’s probably over-engineering it. If people are on the same page from the outset it shouldn’t be necessary to spell it out any further.

Yeah explicitly showing what would be included would be good…
I think it will eventually go that way, but for now I’d still like to keep it simpler.
I’ve added this to version 2.1.4 and it’s ready for testing, if you’d like to take it for a whirl (the version includes a few other fixes too.) If so, you can [download it here](https://github.com/mnelson4/printmyblog/archive/BUG/easy-footnotes-compatibility.zip), upload it to your blog (preferably a test site, or at least one where you can quickly deactivate this version should it have a fatal error or something), deactivate the current version of Print My Blog already on your site (latest released version is 2.1.3), and then activate this new version (2.1.4). You’ll see the new text when choosing dates to filter by, and notice that it always INCLUDES items from the date specified. The text on the printout changed too (if you’ve chosen to show “filters used” in the header content), instead of saying “Posts between datex and datey” it will say “Posts published on date”, “Posts published from datex to datey”, “Posts published on datex and later” or “Posts published on datey and earlier.” Let me know if that wording makes sense to you.
If you don’t have a chance to test it, no worries.

Yep, I’d love to, thanks. Just tested it out on the whole blog at once and it managed to generate all the content with no problems at all using 999 as the timeout setting (quick too!), though when I came to print to PDF, the mini-preview failed. Not a big deal really – I was throwing about 5.5k worth of pages at it including thousands of pictures. If I was doing it for real I’d split it up like last time to be kinder to the plugin.

I didn’t use the show filters option, but the wording above sounds fine to me. On the fine-tuning/settings page itself, looking again I’m not so sure about the ‘or’ word as it possibly introduces confusion/doubt? It seems to suggest that the outcome might be different depending on circumstances, whereas you’d hope the result would always be uniform. If you swapped ‘or’ with ‘and’ I think it sounds more certain. As before though, maybe it’s just me. People of all nationalities will be reading this text and may interpret it differently.

Hi thanks a lot for giving it a try!

I released 2.1.4 and went with the wording “Posted after (and including)”. Hopefully that makes some sense.

I think if anyone else reports being confused at this I’ll go with your suggestion to show exactly what range they’ve selected (eg “You selected posts from {date} and earlier”, ” You selected posts from {date} and later”, or “You selected posts from {date} to {date}”).)

Thanks for the feedback, more welcome!

My pleasure. Yep, definitely, that sounds perfect. I think if anyone struggles with comprehending that, they may well be speakers of English as a foreign language, and there’s no accounting for that.

Presenting the proposed output as above may be a fun challenge regardless if you can find the time at some point. Extra refinement can’t hurt.

FYI these new features/fixes got a mention in my January “Transparency Report”