Holding Back the Years

As someone with an interest in natural history, I often look forward to seasonal occurrences, the first cuckoo or blackthorn blossom.

I also keep track of some of these things here on my blog and on Flickr. I find searching both places useful for all sorts of reasons, but not for figuring out what to expect or remembering when I’ve heard the first cuckoo.

A while back I, sort of solved the problem here by making a page that allows me to search the blog and order the results by the date without the years.

I’ve been playing about with Flickr searches in the same way and now have a simple page which searches for a tag and order the page by months, ignoring the years. The page loads the tag flora by default. If you give it a t parameter, it will search for that instead: ?t=butterfly. I’ve also brefly tested a u parameter for username. This needs to be a user’s NSID (71428177@N00 not troutcolor), it defaults to mine.

It also also loads the first 500 images, which is a bridge I’ll need to cross for some tags soon.

Update, 22 Aug 2025, I’ve improved this somewhat and moved it here: Flickr By Month. Defaults to butterflies now.