“Who ya gonna call?” “CODEBUSTERS”
No.
But the metaphor of Ghostbusters crossing the streams was inversely appropriate to a little bit of code action over the holidays (of which the actual action was nil).
But this was fun.
This nice tweet from John Johnston (who spawned the idea) reminded me of a WordPress plugin I had made
The WP Posted Today plugin is meant to offer a short code you can put on a site and it will list all previous posts on the current calendar day (this of course is useful if you actually still blog regularly) (cough) (cough).
Just for grins I checked the page where I use my own plugin. Yikes. Red Alert. It displayed all the ones for December 29 in years past, but the part where it should list how many there were was blank.
I dug into my own code… and found myself a bit lost. Crossed. I was not even sure where I got the sprintf functions (John’s original code?) that were aimed to be compatible if anyone every wanted a language translation (maybe, or it’s just that thing when people code things differently).
Taking the path of least resistance, I took out the code where I think the problem was occurring and did it a more simple, but brute force way.
And it worked.
So I updated the version on GitHub and felt at peace with the world. In the off chance someone stumbled into my little corner of code, they would find something that works (or should work).
And then (here comes a stream crossing) Michael Hanscom @djwudi — someone I don’t think I’ve ever communicated with — tweets that he had seen pretty much the same bug and offered a fix.
In looking at his post I saw the fix he made, and said– that’s better than mine! So I decided today to roll back my changes in place of Michael’s solution (but also keeping a modification I had made to remove extraneous calls when not needed for singular versus multiple results).
I noted the extra change he made in hos own version
Plus, I’ve made one other tweak to the plugin, so that it adds a link to the end of the excerpt to better handle “microblog” style entries that don’t have titles, so I still get to feel good about that part, as well. 🙂 My coding skills may be underdeveloped and rusty from lack of regular use, but they’re not entirely atrophied!
In this case, these microblog type entries (see Michael’s demo page) lack titles, so yes, a link is needed at the end of the post excerpt.
Yet I could see that regular posts (like on my site) did not need the extra link, and also, not everyone might want the arrow Michael likes.
I solved this cleverly by creating an additional shortcode parameter more which defaults to a blank string. In the shortcode function, we convert any attributes passed to variables with
extract(shortcode_atts( array( "month" => '', "day" => '', 'excerpt' => 1, 'more' => '' ), $atts ));
So on my site, where I just used the shortcode There are 12 posts previously published on May 15th
- 2017
- Two Slack Half Tricks for #NetNarr The Networked Narratives course is just about wrapped up for now (just those pesky grades to submit). I’ve been wanting to go back and write up some of the behind the scenes details that slipped through the blogging cracks in real time. You will find them on this here blog tagged makingnetnarr as I try […]
- The #DS106 June 30 Day Daily Create Challenge Just for the heck of it, a revival from the summer of 2013… It’s time to get in shape. Sergeant Hulka is here to say more… (ignore the date and old URL at the end, see below) We give you a ds106 daily create summer creative challenge– because your creativity has gotten FLABBY! Do you […]
- 2016
- In the MOOD: presentation for Open Education 2016 Conference The Creative Commons Certification project will be shared at the 13th Annual Open Education Conference November 2–4, 2016 in Richmond, VA. This presentation by Paul Stacey and Alan Levine plays a bit at the “MOOC” acronym with it’s title In the MOOD: Building the Creative Commons Certification: Deeply woven into successful open education and pedagogy […]
- 2014
- I Wanted to Hug The Agent at Gate F7b Mmmmm, the taste of one’s own dog food. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by Jordan Batch I saw in the twitters that Alec Couros got stranded at Chicago O’Hare airport on Monday. Having spent a #NightAtORD last year creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I suggested […]
- 2013
- True Stories of Openness Plays at Yavapai College My pal Todd Conaway invited me to be a speaker at his school, Yavapai College, in Prescott, where they are running a three day faculty institute (Todd claims when he started, this event ran fo 6 days, that is hard core!). Yavapai is a multi campus system that serves the county of the same name. […]
- A World of Their/Our Own New blog post: "ds106zone: You are About to Enter Another Dimension" http://t.co/nDXUH3lrTo #ds106 #ds106 #soitbegins — Jim Groom (@jimgroom) May 13, 2013 When Jim Groom lights up #ds106 you can feel the energy waves transmorgify. I for one am darned excited because I now get to be a humble open participant in ds106, and the […]
- 2009
- Not Your Grandmother’s Tag Cloud Here’s a big twitterbution to robin2go (who was so cool to meet in person at Penn State) for sharing a really cool WordPress Plugin — Tagnetic Poetry. It displays your WordPress tags as something that looks like the magnets you make into poems for your fridge– and just as they do, in your blog you […]
- Salem State Double Header I sit brain dead in a plane heading west, home, after a New England road tour with stops at Baruch College in Manhattan, Penn State University, Middlebury Vermont, and wrapping yesterday in Salem, Massachusetts. The stop at Salem was an invited session for their sixth Future is Now conference a semester end gathering for faculty […]
- 2007
- Ahoy Fredericksburg I’ve landed safely for Faculty Academy 2007 here at University of Mary Washington. For 2 years, I’ve watched and listened remotely to podcasts, secretly desiring to be a part of this amazing series of events (and still trying to figure out how the heck Gardner managed last year to get Jon Udell to be a […]
- 2005
- The Wait Is Over Just short of 3 weeks converted from my old MovableType blog to this new one running WordPress, and I got my first slice of comment spam. Ewwww, it is pretty smelly, but it just slide easily off the moderation queue into the dung heap. I’ve waited to implement more WP anti-spam plugins, waiting to see […]
- Sniffing the Ajax A new web technology is tickling my antennae. I hardly know enough about Ajax (bit WikiPedia does) to write about it. In my nutshell, it allows you to create interactive web pages or web pages with navigation that can change content within the page without doing a fresh HTTP request (a.k.a loading a new URL) […]
- New Flickr Group: In Camera No PhotoShop To learn, do. So to better understand how flickr groups work (sidenote- something on the net has “arrived” when I do not have to hyperlink its mention, when I write “flickr” it hardly seems necessary to lin k it to http://flickr.com/, see also Google) I decided to create a new flickr group. Flickr groups allow […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 12 posts previously published on May 15th
- 2017
- Two Slack Half Tricks for #NetNarr The Networked Narratives course is just about wrapped up for now (just those pesky grades to submit). I’ve been wanting to go back and write up some of the behind the scenes details that slipped through the blogging cracks in real time. You will find them on this here blog tagged makingnetnarr as I try […] ➡
- The #DS106 June 30 Day Daily Create Challenge Just for the heck of it, a revival from the summer of 2013… It’s time to get in shape. Sergeant Hulka is here to say more… (ignore the date and old URL at the end, see below) We give you a ds106 daily create summer creative challenge– because your creativity has gotten FLABBY! Do you […] ➡
- 2016
- In the MOOD: presentation for Open Education 2016 Conference The Creative Commons Certification project will be shared at the 13th Annual Open Education Conference November 2–4, 2016 in Richmond, VA. This presentation by Paul Stacey and Alan Levine plays a bit at the “MOOC” acronym with it’s title In the MOOD: Building the Creative Commons Certification: Deeply woven into successful open education and pedagogy […] ➡
- 2014
- I Wanted to Hug The Agent at Gate F7b Mmmmm, the taste of one’s own dog food. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by Jordan Batch I saw in the twitters that Alec Couros got stranded at Chicago O’Hare airport on Monday. Having spent a #NightAtORD last year creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I suggested […] ➡
- 2013
- True Stories of Openness Plays at Yavapai College My pal Todd Conaway invited me to be a speaker at his school, Yavapai College, in Prescott, where they are running a three day faculty institute (Todd claims when he started, this event ran fo 6 days, that is hard core!). Yavapai is a multi campus system that serves the county of the same name. […] ➡
- A World of Their/Our Own New blog post: "ds106zone: You are About to Enter Another Dimension" http://t.co/nDXUH3lrTo #ds106 #ds106 #soitbegins — Jim Groom (@jimgroom) May 13, 2013 When Jim Groom lights up #ds106 you can feel the energy waves transmorgify. I for one am darned excited because I now get to be a humble open participant in ds106, and the […] ➡
- 2009
- Not Your Grandmother’s Tag Cloud Here’s a big twitterbution to robin2go (who was so cool to meet in person at Penn State) for sharing a really cool WordPress Plugin — Tagnetic Poetry. It displays your WordPress tags as something that looks like the magnets you make into poems for your fridge– and just as they do, in your blog you […] ➡
- Salem State Double Header I sit brain dead in a plane heading west, home, after a New England road tour with stops at Baruch College in Manhattan, Penn State University, Middlebury Vermont, and wrapping yesterday in Salem, Massachusetts. The stop at Salem was an invited session for their sixth Future is Now conference a semester end gathering for faculty […] ➡
- 2007
- Ahoy Fredericksburg I’ve landed safely for Faculty Academy 2007 here at University of Mary Washington. For 2 years, I’ve watched and listened remotely to podcasts, secretly desiring to be a part of this amazing series of events (and still trying to figure out how the heck Gardner managed last year to get Jon Udell to be a […] ➡
- 2005
- The Wait Is Over Just short of 3 weeks converted from my old MovableType blog to this new one running WordPress, and I got my first slice of comment spam. Ewwww, it is pretty smelly, but it just slide easily off the moderation queue into the dung heap. I’ve waited to implement more WP anti-spam plugins, waiting to see […] ➡
- Sniffing the Ajax A new web technology is tickling my antennae. I hardly know enough about Ajax (bit WikiPedia does) to write about it. In my nutshell, it allows you to create interactive web pages or web pages with navigation that can change content within the page without doing a fresh HTTP request (a.k.a loading a new URL) […] ➡
- New Flickr Group: In Camera No PhotoShop To learn, do. So to better understand how flickr groups work (sidenote- something on the net has “arrived” when I do not have to hyperlink its mention, when I write “flickr” it hardly seems necessary to lin k it to http://flickr.com/, see also Google) I decided to create a new flickr group. Flickr groups allow […] ➡
// output post and link
$output .= '
' . get_the_title() . '';
// display excerpt if we want it
if ( $excerpt ) $output .= ' ' . get_the_excerpt();
// for microblog output where there might not be titles so add a link at end
// h/t https://www.michaelhanscom.com/eclecticism/2020/01/02/rss-feed-weirdness-and-php-debugging/
$output .= ' ' . $more . '';
So how is that for the odds of streams crossing on the same obscure bit of code? That’s the old fashioned kind of net serendipity that still happens.
Thanks Michael! Check out his 20 year old blog, he’s an “Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk” quite the tag line.
Featured Image: Edit of the Ghostbusters Cross Streams scene found in the Ghostbusters Fandom Wiki site which states “Community content is available under CC-BY-SA unless otherwise noted.” I replaced part of the background with a screenshot of the WP Posted Today PHP code.
