Trying to create a views filter that groups nodes by most recent day of publication -- any thoughts?

I'm trying to create a view that will display all of the nodes created on the "most recent day of publication."

I'm interested in doing the same thing, and then possibly, using the Weight module, ordering by what I think is most important for "today" or whatever day it was that I last posted something. I thought maybe the Date Views plugin module might be able to do something like the first part.

Here's a PHP page snippet I whipped up, but ideally I'd like it to be a view so that you can throw other filters in there, like node type, etc.

$query = "SELECT created FROM node WHERE status  = 1 AND type = 'blog' ORDER BY created DESC LIMIT 1";
$timestamp = db_result(db_query($query));

$year = date('Y', $timestamp);
$day = date('d', $timestamp);
$month = date('n', $timestamp);

$start = mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, $day, $year);
$end = mktime(23, 59, 59, $month, $day, $year);

$result = db_query("SELECT nid FROM node WHERE status = 1 AND created >= %d AND created <= %d", $start, $end);

while ($n = db_fetch_object($result)) {
  $node = node_load(array('nid' => $n->nid));
  $output .= node_view($node);
}
print $output;

My problem is almost exactly as you described it in the original post, ubersoft.

I've got a custom content-type that I called in_brief, which is usually just a short snippet with an occasional longer article. I usually publish them on weekdays, and never on weekends. In order to plan for potential future changes, I wanted the custom code to work with an arbitrary number of published in_brief nodes per day, instead of the usual 3 per weekday.

So here's the code I wrote today:

<?php

$nodetypeforquery = 'in_brief';
$query = "SELECT n.nid, n.type, n.title, n.created, nr.body, nr.teaser FROM {node} AS n INNER JOIN {node_revisions} AS nr ON n.nid = nr.nid WHERE n.type = '%s' ORDER BY n.created DESC";

$query_result = db_query_range($query, $nodetypeforquery, 0, 10);

// One call to db_fetch_object() needs to happen
// at least once outside of any looping contruct
// so we can pull out the node.created data from the
// top of the result set and check against it inside
// a loop.
  $inbrief_query = db_fetch_object($query_result);
  $created_date = getdate($inbrief_query->created);
  $readable_date = t(sprintf("%s, %d %s, %d", $created_date[weekday], $created_date[mday], $created_date[month], $created_date[year])); ?>
  <ul>
    <li>
	  <h3><?php print l($inbrief_query->title, 'node/' . $inbrief_query->nid); ?></h3>
	  <h4><?php print $readable_date; ?></h4>
	  <p><?php print t($inbrief_query->body); ?></p>
    </li>
<?php
while($inbrief_query = db_fetch_object($query_result)) {
    $date_to_check = getdate($inbrief_query->created);
	
	if (($created_date[mday] == $date_to_check[mday]) &&
	    ($created_date[mon] == $date_to_check[mon]) &&
		($created_date[year] == $date_to_check[year])) {?>
      <li>
        <h3><?php print l($inbrief_query->title, 'node/' . $inbrief_query->nid); ?></h3>
	    <h4><?php print $readable_date; ?></h4>
	    <p><?php print $inbrief_query->body; ?></p>
      </li>
<?php
	} else break;
  } ?>
  </ul>

The code works as expected (!), except that I'm putting this directly into a custom block. I think this means I don't have the same easy access to node data/attributes that I would if I were to create/use the file node-in_brief.tpl.php. However, I don't think I want to implement this script in the .tpl.php file, because that would create universal changes to all in_brief nodes, which isn't what I want. I just want a block with the most recent day's in_brief nodes. I want output that contains all of the elements of a standard node: i.e. linked title (which I have), body content (which I have), taxonomy tags (don't have), "submitted" information (don't have), a "read more" link (don't have), etc.

Could I be approaching this the wrong way? Can Drupal perhaps do the query and JOIN for me? I realize I could simply include all the needed data into the db_query, but I keep wondering if there's a simpler way to do it. . . .

Anyone have any ideas on how I can get the full-fleged $node data/attributes while retaining the idea behind the query (to select the most recent day's published content-type). Let me know if anything's unclear; this is my very first venture into practical php scripting, so I wouldn't be surprised if I'm trying to reinvent the wheel.