“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 8 posts previously published on July 19th
- 2016
- Flipping Data Tables for Organizing Submitted Resources A key characteristic of the Creative Commons Certification project is a goal to, as much as possible, use openly licensed content and activities within the activities people will do to earn a certification. There is, of course, much material out there to explain, demonstrate, and help people learn about copyright, fair use, the public domain, […]
- 2013
- ds106 Daily Create Challenge (19): Dig My Yellowness cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Today’s ds106 Daily Create Challenge was a photographic one, based on color. Yellow Like The Summer Sun. Take a photo dominated by the solar color. Pretty hard for me in this stretch not to find a sunflower to work! Share this barking on social […]
- 2012
- If at first you do not succeed… Since we are making our ds10r students do it, we really ought to be trying the Remix Generator too. My spin and some play got me: This is the remix of the assignment Brian Metcalfe’s Image with a Message: Demonstrate that “a picture is worth a thousand words” by superimposing a famous quotation over a […]
- 2009
- My Experience is Everybody’s? cc licensed flickr photo shared by Llima I start this post with (a) an unsure direction where it is going and (b) I am 100% guilty of what I am about to describe. As we perhaps begin to unravel the implications of living in a networked world of connections through technology, devices, networks, there is […]
- 2006
- Shocking Results in Blogger Survey! I want a job writing tabloid headlines. New from the Pew/Internet gang, comes Bloggers: A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers: The ease and appeal of blogging is inspiring a new group of writers and creators to share their voices with the world. A national phone survey of bloggers finds that most are focused on […]
- 2005
- DJ Stephen Mixes It Down He’s hip but he may not be available to entertain at your cousin’s wedding… see how Stephen Downes’ voice, Powerpoints, and a little backbeat are set up smoothly in a 6 minute video crafted by Zach Chandler at Colby College: http://studio.colby.edu/people/zach/reusable_media_lg.mov It could be a whole new art form of compressing presentations to their bare […]
- Flickr Concentration Mastercards with flickr uses the gazillion images found in flickr to create the familiar game of image matching. The site creator gives the nod to the version from Games For the Brain (a nice collection of stuff), but isn’t this really the old game of “Concentration”? Here is the game I played using a flickr […]
- Be Wary of Writers Who Use Manufactured Words Like “Monetize” My wife rightfully chided me the other night for a junior high school habit of issuing a loud yell of “bulls***” at the same time I sneeze. I have almost the same reaction when I read cruft like “Free Website Content – The Future of RSS is Not Blogs”– the claim being the majority, the […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 8 posts previously published on July 19th
- 2016
- Flipping Data Tables for Organizing Submitted Resources A key characteristic of the Creative Commons Certification project is a goal to, as much as possible, use openly licensed content and activities within the activities people will do to earn a certification. There is, of course, much material out there to explain, demonstrate, and help people learn about copyright, fair use, the public domain, […] ➡
- 2013
- ds106 Daily Create Challenge (19): Dig My Yellowness cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Today’s ds106 Daily Create Challenge was a photographic one, based on color. Yellow Like The Summer Sun. Take a photo dominated by the solar color. Pretty hard for me in this stretch not to find a sunflower to work! Share this barking on […] ➡
- 2012
- If at first you do not succeed… Since we are making our ds10r students do it, we really ought to be trying the Remix Generator too. My spin and some play got me: This is the remix of the assignment Brian Metcalfe’s Image with a Message: Demonstrate that “a picture is worth a thousand words” by superimposing a famous quotation over a […] ➡
- 2009
- My Experience is Everybody’s? cc licensed flickr photo shared by Llima I start this post with (a) an unsure direction where it is going and (b) I am 100% guilty of what I am about to describe. As we perhaps begin to unravel the implications of living in a networked world of connections through technology, devices, networks, there is […] ➡
- 2006
- Shocking Results in Blogger Survey! I want a job writing tabloid headlines. New from the Pew/Internet gang, comes Bloggers: A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers: The ease and appeal of blogging is inspiring a new group of writers and creators to share their voices with the world. A national phone survey of bloggers finds that most are focused on […] ➡
- 2005
- DJ Stephen Mixes It Down He’s hip but he may not be available to entertain at your cousin’s wedding… see how Stephen Downes’ voice, Powerpoints, and a little backbeat are set up smoothly in a 6 minute video crafted by Zach Chandler at Colby College: http://studio.colby.edu/people/zach/reusable_media_lg.mov It could be a whole new art form of compressing presentations to their bare […] ➡
- Flickr Concentration Mastercards with flickr uses the gazillion images found in flickr to create the familiar game of image matching. The site creator gives the nod to the version from Games For the Brain (a nice collection of stuff), but isn’t this really the old game of “Concentration”? Here is the game I played using a flickr […] ➡
- Be Wary of Writers Who Use Manufactured Words Like “Monetize” My wife rightfully chided me the other night for a junior high school habit of issuing a loud yell of “bulls***” at the same time I sneeze. I have almost the same reaction when I read cruft like “Free Website Content – The Future of RSS is Not Blogs”– the claim being the majority, the […] ➡
// 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.
