My Blog’s Anniversary

When did I first create my WordPress blog? You might be surprised by how many people want to know this after years of blogging.

Back in 2011, that date of creation was fairly easy to find. You could go to your Dashboard, Options and Domains. On that panel, you’d find the date you assigned the domain to your blog. For most people, that date is the date of creation.

But for others, the blog may have been up and running long before purchasing a domain name. Then what do you do? Yeah, good luck finding that.

If you search for this topic, you’ll find a wide variety of suggestions.

• Look at the date you created your WordPress account.
  That’s not really helpful if you created your WordPress blog on a host other than WordPress, then you may not have a WordPress account. And you may have created a WordPress account long before you started blogging.
• Look at when you created your first post.
  That’s not really helpful either. If you’re like me, you created and worked on your blog for a few days, before you published your first post. And you may have deleted that initial “Hello World” post that comes with a WordPress installation. Not to mention, you may have back-dated a post to be published prior to when you created the blog.

So how do you find that illusive date?

Well you could have written the date down somewhere when you created the blog initially. I’ve created 8 WordPress blogs for myself and family members. I wrote the start date down, for only 1 of those. Oh joy!

I started thinking, about my very first blog. I know I spent at least 2 or 3 days working on its look and feel, before I published my first post. Hey! Media! I uploaded images for that look and feel!

Finding Your Date!
Whither you’re using the Classic Editor or the most current WordPress Editor (does anyone like the new version? Yuck), the following should basically be the same process. So my best suggestion is to login to your blog’s Dashboard. Select Media and display your images.

1. Select the “Details” icon to display your images in a list. (The highlighted blue icon on the far left).
2. Select the drop down date box, and scroll to the bottom. Then select the last month in the list. In the case of the image below, that’s March 2014.
3. Then press the Filter button.

Once your filter is displayed, look to the right of the panel. You’ll see how many items are listed, and several scroll icons to move through the number pages available. In the image below, there are 4 pages of images from the first month of my blog. On your panel, click the far right double arrow icon to jump to the last page of your listings.

Once the last page of your image list has been displayed, scroll to the bottom. The very first image you uploaded to your blog, is probably the very last picture in the list. And it is most likely the start date for your blog. In my case, that’s March 27, 2014.

That date is several months after the “first” post of my blog. If you were to look at the Archives listing on my blog, you’ll see an option to display the January 2011 posts. There you’ll find the “first” post, from January 11, 2011. So there’s a bit of a discrepancy between the first post and when I’m pretty sure I created the blog.

Prior to blogging, I had a static website for this domain. It took me several months to move some of the web=pages to blog posts. In part because I was selective in what I decided to move over and republish.

It took me a year after my beloved Dalmatan’s passing, to create In Memory of Destinie. So that date for this post reflected the date I created that original web-page on my original site. And the date really has nothing to do with the creation of the blog. So people who use that first blog post as their start date, may have done something similar. Which makes it really hard to use “posts” as a chronological record for a blog.

I think the best record, can be found in your Media uploads. Until WordPress finds a way to record and/or display that very first day a blog was created, this might be the best way to find that date.

Anyway, I hope this gets you close to your start date. And Happy Anniversary!

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