“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 18 posts previously published on August 22nd
- 2017
- 2014
- Smile, You Are on a PirateBox! As a photographer and lover of old devices, I do not think I could have found a better container for my new PirateBox. I found this old Brownie Camera at Granny’s Antiques in Payson; I was looking for a small interesting container for this small router and power supply (it was almost in a wooden […]
- 2013
- ds106 Bank Nuevo: Assignments Now Fully Functional Here is what an assignment looks like (today) on the development version for a theme that will ultimately give other people a way to build something like the ds106 Assignment Bank This nonsensical example may or may not be here tomorrow, click at your own peril. A screenshot does not give an indication about what […]
- 2011
- Roadcast: Lonely Roads in Ontario cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog As promised, the scenery was epic along highway 17 tracing the north side of the Great Lakes in Ontario. Did I say it was long? I think it was over 2000km or maybe it was 20,000 or 200,000. I did 3 days in a row […]
- The Kindness of (not really) Strangers cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog On my current road odyssey, there us a continual growing list of people who have showered me with hospitality and generosity. One that deserves special mention is Donna Fry, someone I had not communicated with before, but when I tweeted something about planning the route […]
- Road Stats: Week 8 cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of days on the road: 56 Miles Driven: 6462 Number of States/Provinces driven in: 11 Number of US/Canadian Border Crossings: 1 Money spent on gas: $1412.45 Photos posted: 1411 (that is an average of 25.2 per day) Number of nights in hotels/B&B: 9 Number […]
- 2008
- Booted By the Apple Comment Police: Saying “Stupid Design” is Bad photo credit: minifig A post I made to the Apple Discussion forums this morning has been shown the back door, and I guess I have been slapped. They took my post off their site, who gives a rat’s arse when I can publish it here? I posted something because I have been stumped through other […]
- Silly Map / 13000 Views Silly Map / 13000 Views by cogdogblog posted 22 Aug ’08, 11.56am MDT PST on flickr How crazy, crazy, crazy. My play last May of Make Starbucks say "Large" at asking people to add a node on a GoogleMap if they could get someone at Starbucks to refer to a large coffee as "Large" — […]
- Four Paws Up for Nellie’s Dog Song! How could I resist a title in my RSS Reader from the TED Blog called “Nellie McKay: The Dog Song”: If you need a companion Just go to the pound get yourself a hound and make the dog proud. That’s what it’s all about It’s a lot of fun; even downloaded the MP4 to have […]
- 2007
- I Can Quit at Any Time… 91%How Addicted to Blogging Are You? Mingle2 – mingle Thanks to Rob (linktribution), I have exact data on the problem. My blogging here has been sporadic due to blogging directed elsewhere… After our week long conference held in Second Life (I hear you snickering out there)… I was blogged out having tried to blog the […]
- 2006
- MacBookPro RIP My laptop screen is officially DOA. My shipping box to send it back to Apple’s intensive care unit should arrive today so I can send it off before I leave for vacation at the end of the week. When I was on the phone with Apple, they kept asking me if the effect was “re-producible” […]
- 2005
- Little Bits of Syndication Maybe some readers are all over RSS and massive amounts of syndication of content, but I am jazzed whenever I discover some small, useful, time saving way to make use of the Small Technologies Loosely Joined. Using free web content services like flickr, del.icio.us, Technorati that can travel the RSS road to dynamically update content […]
- Thanks Lifehacker! Getting Out of Dante’s Descent of Phone Trees If there is one thing more vile than unwanted spam, it is the automated phone menu trees one is forced to navigate to deal with so called “customer service”. The ever so helpful Lifehacker provided a suggestion for How to get through to an Operator at Comcast: After you finish dialing and you hear that […]
- 2004
- Hanging Out with Wyatt Earp Who needs Broadway? Last night we were at the “theater” in Pine Arizona (that is the town community hall, an old school gym that still has the wooden basketball court floor), with $7 tickets to see the one performance by Wyatt Earp – that is his name and he is the great nephew of the […]
- 2003
- Bad Dog: Stuffing Newsletters inside RSS I am all for expanding the use of RSS, and new things are popping up every day. However, stuffing an entire newsletter inside an RSS feed as listed at Lockergnome (referring to Barbara Feldman’s “Ezine-Tips” on Using RSS to Deliver Newsletters seems to me a bad trend of stuffing a lot of things into RSS […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 18 posts previously published on August 22nd
- 2017
- 2014
- Smile, You Are on a PirateBox! As a photographer and lover of old devices, I do not think I could have found a better container for my new PirateBox. I found this old Brownie Camera at Granny’s Antiques in Payson; I was looking for a small interesting container for this small router and power supply (it was almost in a wooden […] ➡
- 2013
- ds106 Bank Nuevo: Assignments Now Fully Functional Here is what an assignment looks like (today) on the development version for a theme that will ultimately give other people a way to build something like the ds106 Assignment Bank This nonsensical example may or may not be here tomorrow, click at your own peril. A screenshot does not give an indication about what […] ➡
- 2011
- Roadcast: Lonely Roads in Ontario cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog As promised, the scenery was epic along highway 17 tracing the north side of the Great Lakes in Ontario. Did I say it was long? I think it was over 2000km or maybe it was 20,000 or 200,000. I did 3 days in a row […] ➡
- The Kindness of (not really) Strangers cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog On my current road odyssey, there us a continual growing list of people who have showered me with hospitality and generosity. One that deserves special mention is Donna Fry, someone I had not communicated with before, but when I tweeted something about planning the route […] ➡
- Road Stats: Week 8 cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of days on the road: 56 Miles Driven: 6462 Number of States/Provinces driven in: 11 Number of US/Canadian Border Crossings: 1 Money spent on gas: $1412.45 Photos posted: 1411 (that is an average of 25.2 per day) Number of nights in hotels/B&B: 9 Number […] ➡
- 2008
- Booted By the Apple Comment Police: Saying “Stupid Design” is Bad photo credit: minifig A post I made to the Apple Discussion forums this morning has been shown the back door, and I guess I have been slapped. They took my post off their site, who gives a rat’s arse when I can publish it here? I posted something because I have been stumped through other […] ➡
- Silly Map / 13000 Views Silly Map / 13000 Views by cogdogblog posted 22 Aug ’08, 11.56am MDT PST on flickr How crazy, crazy, crazy. My play last May of Make Starbucks say "Large" at asking people to add a node on a GoogleMap if they could get someone at Starbucks to refer to a large coffee as "Large" — […] ➡
- Four Paws Up for Nellie’s Dog Song! How could I resist a title in my RSS Reader from the TED Blog called “Nellie McKay: The Dog Song”: If you need a companion Just go to the pound get yourself a hound and make the dog proud. That’s what it’s all about It’s a lot of fun; even downloaded the MP4 to have […] ➡
- 2007
- I Can Quit at Any Time… 91%How Addicted to Blogging Are You? Mingle2 – mingle Thanks to Rob (linktribution), I have exact data on the problem. My blogging here has been sporadic due to blogging directed elsewhere… After our week long conference held in Second Life (I hear you snickering out there)… I was blogged out having tried to blog the […] ➡
- 2006
- MacBookPro RIP My laptop screen is officially DOA. My shipping box to send it back to Apple’s intensive care unit should arrive today so I can send it off before I leave for vacation at the end of the week. When I was on the phone with Apple, they kept asking me if the effect was “re-producible” […] ➡
- 2005
- Little Bits of Syndication Maybe some readers are all over RSS and massive amounts of syndication of content, but I am jazzed whenever I discover some small, useful, time saving way to make use of the Small Technologies Loosely Joined. Using free web content services like flickr, del.icio.us, Technorati that can travel the RSS road to dynamically update content […] ➡
- Thanks Lifehacker! Getting Out of Dante’s Descent of Phone Trees If there is one thing more vile than unwanted spam, it is the automated phone menu trees one is forced to navigate to deal with so called “customer service”. The ever so helpful Lifehacker provided a suggestion for How to get through to an Operator at Comcast: After you finish dialing and you hear that […] ➡
- 2004
- Hanging Out with Wyatt Earp Who needs Broadway? Last night we were at the “theater” in Pine Arizona (that is the town community hall, an old school gym that still has the wooden basketball court floor), with $7 tickets to see the one performance by Wyatt Earp – that is his name and he is the great nephew of the […] ➡
- 2003
- Bad Dog: Stuffing Newsletters inside RSS I am all for expanding the use of RSS, and new things are popping up every day. However, stuffing an entire newsletter inside an RSS feed as listed at Lockergnome (referring to Barbara Feldman’s “Ezine-Tips” on Using RSS to Deliver Newsletters seems to me a bad trend of stuffing a lot of things into RSS […] ➡
// 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.
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