“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 11 posts previously published on May 19th
- 2017
- My Dog Crapped in Front of a Church (you will believe what happened next) Dog turds and clickbait are a match. Follow my story. Yesterday I was in Payson, the “big” town nearest me (~15,000 people, where there is a Home Depot, Walmart, Safeway, doctors, fast food, hospital, maybe one good coffee shop. I had a string of appointments lined up. There was one I could not schedule was […]
- When your music is over… Yesterday’s twitter was piped with laments of the too early death of musician Chris Cornell. I have to admit not knowing much of the man, but his distinctive voice and raw style have been swirling in my mixes for a while, a handful of Temple of the Dog and Soundgarden tracks. Dr Sava(SavaSava) reminded me […]
- 2015
- “Doing It Daily” Back at Maricopa It’s a bit of a mind bend to calculate that it has been more than 9 years since I left my first “real” job — 14 years as an instructional technologist at the Maricopa Community Colleges. The real bend back to reality was the warm greetings I got today returning there for the 2015 Teaching […]
- 2013
- Essence of Spring Springtime at home means a steady stream of macro sots of flowers, and I am rarely disappointed to find a new way to photograph something I have done before. A key of course is a sharp lens, I doubt you get real crisp shots with a zoom lens. This one is with my trusty nifty […]
- 2011
- On Amplification The first working title for this post had a reference to “This one time in Jamcamp…” but the metaphor fell down a dark gurgling hope. But time cannot pass without reflection on the experience of “Nobody’s Listening” ds106radio crew 6 hour music jam at Northern Voice. I think my ears are still reverberating; and that […]
- May Story a Day #19: FAIL (Pixton) Like a flying cannonball, like a balloon full of bricks, my goal to do a digital story a day for May has flopped mercifully: I’m not going to apologize, that is for weenies. It was a tough pace I was holding, but last week’s travel did me in… and frankly, well nobody cares if I […]
- 2009
- Rocks and Hard Places 2009/365/139 Between Some Rocks and A…. by cogdogblog posted 19 May ’09, 10.45pm MDT PST on flickr Feeling like you have no where to go? Is life pressing you in? Do you not see options to get out of what is keeping you from where you want to be? Is some lumbering biped chasing you […]
- GigaPan: Now With Embed! It’s been a while since I shot or even explored Gigapan, the amazing photo exploration tool that lets you see a wide range of zoom detail in a scene. I have not even captured a scene in a while (see my old ‘pans). But by sheer accidental link clicking from my RSS Reader (am I […]
- 2004
- “Pam Te” Project: Laptops to Chiapas My friend and colleague Donna Rebadow, teacher extrordinaire at Paradise Valley Community College, is spearheading an effort at “Bridging the Digital Divide”. As the Pam Te Project, she is hoping in June to travel to Chiapas Mexico, with a load of donated used laptops to support the education of Mayan students: There are 60 young, […]
- BlogSpam: The Troops Are Getting Tired Reports from the trenches on the fight against comment spam…. CDB has been relatively quiet since masquerading the URLs for comment scripts. However, two other blogs on our server, one for a college Center for Teaching and Learning and the other of an Art faculty member, were pummeled this week with the worst of the […]
- 2003
- Onyx-RSS update Thanks to Randy B for noticing that the Onyx RSS parser we use in the RSS to JS demo has been updated. Something about cache-ing issues and line breaks (shrug). Keep up to date. It is a full time job and a half. Share this barking on social media
On Michael’s site he might use There are 11 posts previously published on May 19th
- 2017
- My Dog Crapped in Front of a Church (you will believe what happened next) Dog turds and clickbait are a match. Follow my story. Yesterday I was in Payson, the “big” town nearest me (~15,000 people, where there is a Home Depot, Walmart, Safeway, doctors, fast food, hospital, maybe one good coffee shop. I had a string of appointments lined up. There was one I could not schedule was […] ➡
- When your music is over… Yesterday’s twitter was piped with laments of the too early death of musician Chris Cornell. I have to admit not knowing much of the man, but his distinctive voice and raw style have been swirling in my mixes for a while, a handful of Temple of the Dog and Soundgarden tracks. Dr Sava(SavaSava) reminded me […] ➡
- 2015
- “Doing It Daily” Back at Maricopa It’s a bit of a mind bend to calculate that it has been more than 9 years since I left my first “real” job — 14 years as an instructional technologist at the Maricopa Community Colleges. The real bend back to reality was the warm greetings I got today returning there for the 2015 Teaching […] ➡
- 2013
- Essence of Spring Springtime at home means a steady stream of macro sots of flowers, and I am rarely disappointed to find a new way to photograph something I have done before. A key of course is a sharp lens, I doubt you get real crisp shots with a zoom lens. This one is with my trusty nifty […] ➡
- 2011
- On Amplification The first working title for this post had a reference to “This one time in Jamcamp…” but the metaphor fell down a dark gurgling hope. But time cannot pass without reflection on the experience of “Nobody’s Listening” ds106radio crew 6 hour music jam at Northern Voice. I think my ears are still reverberating; and that […] ➡
- May Story a Day #19: FAIL (Pixton) Like a flying cannonball, like a balloon full of bricks, my goal to do a digital story a day for May has flopped mercifully: I’m not going to apologize, that is for weenies. It was a tough pace I was holding, but last week’s travel did me in… and frankly, well nobody cares if I […] ➡
- 2009
- Rocks and Hard Places 2009/365/139 Between Some Rocks and A…. by cogdogblog posted 19 May ’09, 10.45pm MDT PST on flickr Feeling like you have no where to go? Is life pressing you in? Do you not see options to get out of what is keeping you from where you want to be? Is some lumbering biped chasing you […] ➡
- GigaPan: Now With Embed! It’s been a while since I shot or even explored Gigapan, the amazing photo exploration tool that lets you see a wide range of zoom detail in a scene. I have not even captured a scene in a while (see my old ‘pans). But by sheer accidental link clicking from my RSS Reader (am I […] ➡
- 2004
- “Pam Te” Project: Laptops to Chiapas My friend and colleague Donna Rebadow, teacher extrordinaire at Paradise Valley Community College, is spearheading an effort at “Bridging the Digital Divide”. As the Pam Te Project, she is hoping in June to travel to Chiapas Mexico, with a load of donated used laptops to support the education of Mayan students: There are 60 young, […] ➡
- BlogSpam: The Troops Are Getting Tired Reports from the trenches on the fight against comment spam…. CDB has been relatively quiet since masquerading the URLs for comment scripts. However, two other blogs on our server, one for a college Center for Teaching and Learning and the other of an Art faculty member, were pummeled this week with the worst of the […] ➡
- 2003
- Onyx-RSS update Thanks to Randy B for noticing that the Onyx RSS parser we use in the RSS to JS demo has been updated. Something about cache-ing issues and line breaks (shrug). Keep up to date. It is a full time job and a half. Share this barking on social media ➡
// 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.
