“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 October 10th
- 2019
- The Mysteries (and CSS Classing Thereof) of WordPress Giphy Embeds One of the nifty things about WordPress, as if they need naming, is the ability to embed media into posts simply by putting a URL on a blank line and pressing return. No futzing with copying and pasting HTML. Just the link to the page that houses a YouTube video, a SoundCloud audio, a flickr […]
- 2018
- Canning The Can’ts I’m fairly sure most thinking humans have an internal, mostly unsaid list of Can’ts. The list of things we have cemented a certainty that we can’t do. They are way down there in the subconscious, deeply rooted, and often adrift from the experiences that formed them. Mine? They are not always big ones, but they […]
- 2017
- Perpetual Motion Web Machines I’m amazed the gears still turn on some of my old web sites. Sure, the old HTML still works, I have a conference “paper” on the web I did in 1994 that still functions. But it does not really provide more than static information. I smiled at seeing a tweet from friends in New Zealand […]
- 2012
- Random Post Generator Confused? Don’t know where to put a comment on a #ds106 student blog as part of the Magnificent Seven Blog Comment Challenge? I have the link for you. With some rubbing together of magic dust and a dab of elbow grease, I have a new feature for the various “sections” of ds106- these are classes […]
- The Magnificent Seven ds106 Comment Challenge I’ve been urging my students to give each other more constructive feedback via blog comments; but this idea if challenge, coming form a student, not me, is soemthing I have to get behind: http://twitter.com/doodle_muse/status/255896877772464130 Ok, Haley, let’s ee if this works. The challenge is to make 7 constructive comments on 7 different blogs in a […]
- 2011
- My Blues Harp Learning Project #1 cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Dean Shareski has been running a wonderful example of learning by doing/sharing/reflecting in his personal learning project to learn how to play a guitar. There’s a lot of things I like about what he is doing: As a teacher, he is doing the same project […]
- Paved Over Discontent cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Crossing into the 10,000+ mile range of this trip, I am having a blurry epiphany, whatever the heck that means. I set out on the trip with a goal of “seeing what this country is really about”. While I have traveled far, I in actuality […]
- 2010
- 3-D or Not 3-D cc licensed flickr photo shared by The Naughty Prata I barely watch anything on my home TV screen (I don’t get a signal nor any cable, so its for DVDs only), so I’m not quite up to speed on the latest technology for 3-D video but it is a technology we try and track for […]
- 2005
- ABY = Anybody But Yankees Bottom of the eighth, and things are going well. My bias is rooted in my childhood heros circa 1970 and 1983 Share this barking on social media
- 2003
- Learning Objects: Focused Now? Blurry? What follows, or rambles are some thoughts on today’s NLII Focus Session (October 10, 2003) at Ohio State. I should say now that the best part of these events are getting to meet colleagues face to face, and without a doubt the attendance of 60 were all people I respect and value their varied work […]
- Blog Spam sneaks under the Wire Well I feel safer having implemented my blog-spam defense perimeter but apparently there are still some pesky cockroaches sniffing around the edges. Here is another one for those keeping their blog spam filters up to date: IP Address: 219.141.115.94 Name: gifts Email Address: gifts-catalog@yahoo.com add to the banned domains: lstor(dot)com with a variety of un=related […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 11 posts previously published on October 10th
- 2019
- 2018
- Canning The Can’ts I’m fairly sure most thinking humans have an internal, mostly unsaid list of Can’ts. The list of things we have cemented a certainty that we can’t do. They are way down there in the subconscious, deeply rooted, and often adrift from the experiences that formed them. Mine? They are not always big ones, but they […] ➡
- 2017
- Perpetual Motion Web Machines I’m amazed the gears still turn on some of my old web sites. Sure, the old HTML still works, I have a conference “paper” on the web I did in 1994 that still functions. But it does not really provide more than static information. I smiled at seeing a tweet from friends in New Zealand […] ➡
- 2012
- Random Post Generator Confused? Don’t know where to put a comment on a #ds106 student blog as part of the Magnificent Seven Blog Comment Challenge? I have the link for you. With some rubbing together of magic dust and a dab of elbow grease, I have a new feature for the various “sections” of ds106- these are classes […] ➡
- The Magnificent Seven ds106 Comment Challenge I’ve been urging my students to give each other more constructive feedback via blog comments; but this idea if challenge, coming form a student, not me, is soemthing I have to get behind: http://twitter.com/doodle_muse/status/255896877772464130 Ok, Haley, let’s ee if this works. The challenge is to make 7 constructive comments on 7 different blogs in a […] ➡
- 2011
- My Blues Harp Learning Project #1 cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Dean Shareski has been running a wonderful example of learning by doing/sharing/reflecting in his personal learning project to learn how to play a guitar. There’s a lot of things I like about what he is doing: As a teacher, he is doing the same project […] ➡
- Paved Over Discontent cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Crossing into the 10,000+ mile range of this trip, I am having a blurry epiphany, whatever the heck that means. I set out on the trip with a goal of “seeing what this country is really about”. While I have traveled far, I in actuality […] ➡
- 2010
- 3-D or Not 3-D cc licensed flickr photo shared by The Naughty Prata I barely watch anything on my home TV screen (I don’t get a signal nor any cable, so its for DVDs only), so I’m not quite up to speed on the latest technology for 3-D video but it is a technology we try and track for […] ➡
- 2005
- ABY = Anybody But Yankees Bottom of the eighth, and things are going well. My bias is rooted in my childhood heros circa 1970 and 1983 Share this barking on social media ➡
- 2003
- Learning Objects: Focused Now? Blurry? What follows, or rambles are some thoughts on today’s NLII Focus Session (October 10, 2003) at Ohio State. I should say now that the best part of these events are getting to meet colleagues face to face, and without a doubt the attendance of 60 were all people I respect and value their varied work […] ➡
- Blog Spam sneaks under the Wire Well I feel safer having implemented my blog-spam defense perimeter but apparently there are still some pesky cockroaches sniffing around the edges. Here is another one for those keeping their blog spam filters up to date: IP Address: 219.141.115.94 Name: gifts Email Address: gifts-catalog@yahoo.com add to the banned domains: lstor(dot)com with a variety of un=related […] ➡
// 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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