“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 November 28th
- 2018
- Annotating As Augmenting? Coming to a Web Near You Here goes one of those blog posts that start out with only a shred of an idea, so in the writing, maybe something emerges. Anyhow, for the Ontario Extend 9x9x25 its really writing about what you are thinking about, right? I’m thinking about a project I am working on with Gardner Campbell. Yes, that Gardner […]
- 2017
- Paging Image Detectives Surely with all the algorithms, a cartoon image should be easy to find… (and no, Google, I will not stop calling you Shirley). I got a message from Mariana Funes who wants to use this image on her Daily Stillness site. A she is a zealous diligent open educator, she is unwilling to do so […]
- On Transformations My last night in Melbourne was partly spent on the dramatic 37th floor view of the city from the KPMG building, this being a special evening to honor the International Specialised Skills Institute Fellowship Awards Ceremony. I should add that this is their 27th year of awarding this fellowships, and still, few colleagues I met […]
- 2016
- Bushwhacking Through “We Make the Road by Walking” Even before knowing what the book was about, the title of “We Make the Road by Walking” (being run now by as a Bryan Alexander dispersed book club) intrigued me by its rich metaphor title. Sidebar: I’ll be tagging these posts hortonfreire after twitter hashtag of same name When I get to teach students who […]
- Turning Piles of Resource Links into a Dynamic Resource Lists of links… the desire to “curate” lists of web resources is almost as old as the web itself; in our project can we turn the output of resource collection into an open resource itself? Bear with me on probably a bit too much back story… Back in 1993, my first exposure into the web […]
- The Minimalist Telegra.ph Writer No accounts, no logins, no personal information needed. It’s almost SPLOT-like, this zen-ish http://telegra.ph/. Almost nothing on the screen. There is no resemblance to some other mid-sized writing platform You can put your name on the author line or not. Once you publish, you can only edit while your session is active in the browser. […]
- 2015
- TRU Writer SPLOT is Gotta Getta Metabox From the start of SPLOTs we recognized an inherent problem with not asking for people who use them to create accounts / share info– there would be no way for them to modify what they wrote or shared once it was put in. The same thing happened with the UDG Agora version of the DS106 […]
- 2011
- Just Say No to Yes Optus cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by TFDuesing I must admit that when I come across other people’s flaming #FAIL tweets I experience a wave of “hey- over reaction, eh?”– until it is I in the fiery rage of being done under by a bad consumer experience. And here is the thing, no […]
- 2010
- From Argentina Comes New Ways of Telling Dominoe’s Story If you’ve clicked by my 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell Story you will know I have told the same old dog story 50+ times, so it was a refreshing suprise when I got an email tonight from Claudia Ceraso describing a novel way she used Dominoe’s flickr set as a way to have her […]
- 2009
- Breaking News or Broken News? I stand near the front of the line of people who think that the news and publishing business is perched on the edge of looming change that will undermine them as much (or more) than the recording and film industry have faced. This is hardly “news”. But there is this ramping eagerness to be the […]
- 2004
- Hiding Out (Psss -it is snowing right now) Surely of interest to no one, but I’ve been fortunate to enjoy a rather lazy extended piece of time, 6 days wrapped around Thanksgiving at our Arizona mountain hideaway in Strawberry (yes readers, Arizona is not a swath of Arabian windswept desert, but have places with trees and weather). I had sworn our elevation was […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 11 posts previously published on November 28th
- 2018
- Annotating As Augmenting? Coming to a Web Near You Here goes one of those blog posts that start out with only a shred of an idea, so in the writing, maybe something emerges. Anyhow, for the Ontario Extend 9x9x25 its really writing about what you are thinking about, right? I’m thinking about a project I am working on with Gardner Campbell. Yes, that Gardner […] ➡
- 2017
- Paging Image Detectives Surely with all the algorithms, a cartoon image should be easy to find… (and no, Google, I will not stop calling you Shirley). I got a message from Mariana Funes who wants to use this image on her Daily Stillness site. A she is a zealous diligent open educator, she is unwilling to do so […] ➡
- On Transformations My last night in Melbourne was partly spent on the dramatic 37th floor view of the city from the KPMG building, this being a special evening to honor the International Specialised Skills Institute Fellowship Awards Ceremony. I should add that this is their 27th year of awarding this fellowships, and still, few colleagues I met […] ➡
- 2016
- Bushwhacking Through “We Make the Road by Walking” Even before knowing what the book was about, the title of “We Make the Road by Walking” (being run now by as a Bryan Alexander dispersed book club) intrigued me by its rich metaphor title. Sidebar: I’ll be tagging these posts hortonfreire after twitter hashtag of same name When I get to teach students who […] ➡
- Turning Piles of Resource Links into a Dynamic Resource Lists of links… the desire to “curate” lists of web resources is almost as old as the web itself; in our project can we turn the output of resource collection into an open resource itself? Bear with me on probably a bit too much back story… Back in 1993, my first exposure into the web […] ➡
- The Minimalist Telegra.ph Writer No accounts, no logins, no personal information needed. It’s almost SPLOT-like, this zen-ish http://telegra.ph/. Almost nothing on the screen. There is no resemblance to some other mid-sized writing platform You can put your name on the author line or not. Once you publish, you can only edit while your session is active in the browser. […] ➡
- 2015
- TRU Writer SPLOT is Gotta Getta Metabox From the start of SPLOTs we recognized an inherent problem with not asking for people who use them to create accounts / share info– there would be no way for them to modify what they wrote or shared once it was put in. The same thing happened with the UDG Agora version of the DS106 […] ➡
- 2011
- Just Say No to Yes Optus cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by TFDuesing I must admit that when I come across other people’s flaming #FAIL tweets I experience a wave of “hey- over reaction, eh?”– until it is I in the fiery rage of being done under by a bad consumer experience. And here is the thing, no […] ➡
- 2010
- From Argentina Comes New Ways of Telling Dominoe’s Story If you’ve clicked by my 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell Story you will know I have told the same old dog story 50+ times, so it was a refreshing suprise when I got an email tonight from Claudia Ceraso describing a novel way she used Dominoe’s flickr set as a way to have her […] ➡
- 2009
- Breaking News or Broken News? I stand near the front of the line of people who think that the news and publishing business is perched on the edge of looming change that will undermine them as much (or more) than the recording and film industry have faced. This is hardly “news”. But there is this ramping eagerness to be the […] ➡
- 2004
- Hiding Out (Psss -it is snowing right now) Surely of interest to no one, but I’ve been fortunate to enjoy a rather lazy extended piece of time, 6 days wrapped around Thanksgiving at our Arizona mountain hideaway in Strawberry (yes readers, Arizona is not a swath of Arabian windswept desert, but have places with trees and weather). I had sworn our elevation was […] ➡
// 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.
