“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 14 posts previously published on March 13th
- 2023
- OEWeek Eventness (or Madness)? 12+2+2 Unscripted Conversations How often do we get to participate in small group open discussions of our practices? I am not talking about blipping in social media. Last, I chose to to be organize/be in 18 of them, and energized more energetic than any zoom webinar. That week was full on for my organization, Open Education Global with […]
- 2019
- Digital + _______ Talk at University of Regina With the exception of online events, my conference presenting days are behind, me. So it was rewarding to get an invitation to do a session at the University of Regina for ECS 100 (Education Core Studies- “Knowledge, Schooling and Society”). Part of me being there last night may have been my close relationship with one […]
- I Did the Extend mOOC Work We Ask of Participants Among the great lessons I got from my mentor Barbara Ganley was the idea of doing the same assignments assigned to, and along side, your students. In teaching writing at Middlebury College, she completed (and blogged, and syndicated blogs in 2001) the essays she assigned to her students. This too was an ethos I picked […]
- 2014
- Blogging is Being If you’ve ever been in the audience for a Gardner Campbell conference presentation/keynote. you know the “more than a slide deck” kind of feeling there. I’ve been there. I like to call him the “Poet Laurete of Ed Tech” (though the ‘tech’ part seems limiting). But, if like me, you’ve been fortunate to be in […]
- 2013
- Google- I Keep Clicking the Red Button It is definitely NOT Ok, Google. The rationale for shutting down Google Reader smells like my old tennis shoes. You bring in gazillions of bucks on ads and you cannot aford to leave a service running as is? Show us the numbers! Make the Web, don;t breaking it. Bad, dog, Google, you are a very […]
- 2012
- back to W.O.R.K. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by CarbonNYC Just short of a year ago, I blogged about stepping into the great wide open. I quit my job “in these economic times” and planned at least 9 months of rewind, as well as an epic odyssey loop of travel (which came to be) and […]
- 2011
- Yes, Google Knows What I am All About For all their analysis of my e-mail, Google has zeroed in on my interests: For a click of the link, you can find the magic product to stop my annoying bark Share this barking on social media
- Balance, Counter Balance, and Sweet Serendipity When I reflect back on being on the web for 17 years, I feel old and pathetically nostalgic. But then, a pinch of web serendipity buoys my up past the oosphere. It keeps happening again and again, the internet feels on one hand truly infinite in breadth and odd crannies, and then pulled to human […]
- 2007
- During the Deluge Ouch. The first day back at work after an extended time offline. Is there anything else that dangerously might be an influence on the decision to devote time to not being online? I am taking a stand and saying no, even as I drown in un-replied urgent emails, mark as “read” hundreds of RSS feed […]
- 2006
- Running With a New Pack This is a quiet Spring Break week at Maricopa (faculty are off the whole week, staff work MOnday to Wednesday), and I am heaving a rock into the waters, sending some ripples out. Change is all around out there (including Arizona getting in some places, 4 feet of snow in one weekend) and I am […]
- Servers, Damn Servers I like using internet tools. I hate taking care of servers. Today has been a bad jinxed day. Is that more Alberta voodoo? For one thing, I loathe turning off web sites that are still accessible or even actually used. I have some web pages that first popped up more than 12 years ago. But […]
- 2005
- Day 2 at MIT My colleagues and I had another full on day of absorbing and observing at MIT. the night before, our host and contact Phil Long took us to an outstanding Afghan restaurant in Cambridge, called Helmand. Friday started with a bit of blue sky, but the snow did not wait long to start its thing. In […]
- 2004
- What’s In a Name / URL? On the ‘net anything can be anything. Or not. You might think http://www.learningobjects.com/ might be something related to learning objects, but in reality what they do is: enhance the overall learning experience by addressing the needs of key stakeholders at each step in the learning lifecycle, from planning through to delivery, assessment and reporting. Huh? […]
- Confessions of a Lousy Online Teacher The natives are restless and rumbling among the online web teaching course I am co-teaching this semester. One student’s self-evaluation referred to the “hostile” environment (a weeks worth of angry posts to the discussion board). There are a number of factors I am accepting my role in: * It is a course taught previously by […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 14 posts previously published on March 13th
- 2023
- OEWeek Eventness (or Madness)? 12+2+2 Unscripted Conversations How often do we get to participate in small group open discussions of our practices? I am not talking about blipping in social media. Last, I chose to to be organize/be in 18 of them, and energized more energetic than any zoom webinar. That week was full on for my organization, Open Education Global with […] ➡
- 2019
- Digital + _______ Talk at University of Regina With the exception of online events, my conference presenting days are behind, me. So it was rewarding to get an invitation to do a session at the University of Regina for ECS 100 (Education Core Studies- “Knowledge, Schooling and Society”). Part of me being there last night may have been my close relationship with one […] ➡
- I Did the Extend mOOC Work We Ask of Participants Among the great lessons I got from my mentor Barbara Ganley was the idea of doing the same assignments assigned to, and along side, your students. In teaching writing at Middlebury College, she completed (and blogged, and syndicated blogs in 2001) the essays she assigned to her students. This too was an ethos I picked […] ➡
- 2014
- Blogging is Being If you’ve ever been in the audience for a Gardner Campbell conference presentation/keynote. you know the “more than a slide deck” kind of feeling there. I’ve been there. I like to call him the “Poet Laurete of Ed Tech” (though the ‘tech’ part seems limiting). But, if like me, you’ve been fortunate to be in […] ➡
- 2013
- Google- I Keep Clicking the Red Button It is definitely NOT Ok, Google. The rationale for shutting down Google Reader smells like my old tennis shoes. You bring in gazillions of bucks on ads and you cannot aford to leave a service running as is? Show us the numbers! Make the Web, don;t breaking it. Bad, dog, Google, you are a very […] ➡
- 2012
- back to W.O.R.K. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by CarbonNYC Just short of a year ago, I blogged about stepping into the great wide open. I quit my job “in these economic times” and planned at least 9 months of rewind, as well as an epic odyssey loop of travel (which came to be) and […] ➡
- 2011
- Yes, Google Knows What I am All About For all their analysis of my e-mail, Google has zeroed in on my interests: For a click of the link, you can find the magic product to stop my annoying bark Share this barking on social media ➡
- Balance, Counter Balance, and Sweet Serendipity When I reflect back on being on the web for 17 years, I feel old and pathetically nostalgic. But then, a pinch of web serendipity buoys my up past the oosphere. It keeps happening again and again, the internet feels on one hand truly infinite in breadth and odd crannies, and then pulled to human […] ➡
- 2007
- During the Deluge Ouch. The first day back at work after an extended time offline. Is there anything else that dangerously might be an influence on the decision to devote time to not being online? I am taking a stand and saying no, even as I drown in un-replied urgent emails, mark as “read” hundreds of RSS feed […] ➡
- 2006
- Running With a New Pack This is a quiet Spring Break week at Maricopa (faculty are off the whole week, staff work MOnday to Wednesday), and I am heaving a rock into the waters, sending some ripples out. Change is all around out there (including Arizona getting in some places, 4 feet of snow in one weekend) and I am […] ➡
- Servers, Damn Servers I like using internet tools. I hate taking care of servers. Today has been a bad jinxed day. Is that more Alberta voodoo? For one thing, I loathe turning off web sites that are still accessible or even actually used. I have some web pages that first popped up more than 12 years ago. But […] ➡
- 2005
- Day 2 at MIT My colleagues and I had another full on day of absorbing and observing at MIT. the night before, our host and contact Phil Long took us to an outstanding Afghan restaurant in Cambridge, called Helmand. Friday started with a bit of blue sky, but the snow did not wait long to start its thing. In […] ➡
- 2004
- What’s In a Name / URL? On the ‘net anything can be anything. Or not. You might think http://www.learningobjects.com/ might be something related to learning objects, but in reality what they do is: enhance the overall learning experience by addressing the needs of key stakeholders at each step in the learning lifecycle, from planning through to delivery, assessment and reporting. Huh? […] ➡
- Confessions of a Lousy Online Teacher The natives are restless and rumbling among the online web teaching course I am co-teaching this semester. One student’s self-evaluation referred to the “hostile” environment (a weeks worth of angry posts to the discussion board). There are a number of factors I am accepting my role in: * It is a course taught previously by […] ➡
// 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.
