“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 23 posts previously published on February 8th
- 2021
- 50 Year Joslin Medal… Sweet (Splenda-like) It took more than 3 months to get here, but having waiting 50 years, well I’m patient. Within a fancy red velvet covered box I got my Joslin Center Medal for having lived with Type 1 Diabetes for 50 years (that line was crossed in late October 2020). The details were spelled out when I […]
- 2019
- 1-2-3 Annotating the Intent This seems by my time to working on projects using web annotating. As noted early, we are planning more extensive use of hypothes.is in netnarr but the really Big Show is taking off this week, the project with Gardner Campbell on Annotating Doug Engelbart’s Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Some of the background has […]
- 2018
- Episode 3 of the Puerto Rico Connection: Raiders of the Lost Tape By day he’s an ordinary computer science professor at Universidad Sagrado del Corazon, but once he puts that hat on, it’s adventure time for… Puerto Rico Jones? Indiana Vantaggiato? I’ve been thinking it’s time to record a new podcast with Antonio Vantaggiato, and in a few DMs he asked what about the last one we […]
- 2016
- Best of Show in Bookmarking A post earlier this week on social bookmarking garnered the kind of comments that make me feel like it’s the edublogosphere of 2005. Talk about retro! Thanks to all. One thing that I have realized is that there are different goals in bookmarking… Personal organizing of bookmarks. Almost any tool mentioned and more would work, […]
- I Connect With a Little Help From My Friends The email from Maha Bali came the night before I left for my trip to Puerto Rico, a red-eye flickt on February 1. She was asking people to join the Virtually Connecting event planned for the EDUCAUSE ELI meeting: Rebecca’s bday is Feb 2nd and we were hoping to surprise her during a Virtually Connecting […]
- 2015
- We Are Lesser World Without George, Without GeoDuckie The word came via Bryan Alexander’s blog last night that a great spirit of curiosity, interest, creativity has left this world, note of it too on his daughter’s blog. George has gone through numerous health challenges; the photo above was from the time in 2011 I was doing my long odyssey trip and visited and […]
- A Taste of Honey and Cookies It’s your birthday today Mom, and all I got you was a blog post. Again. I bet you are making cookies, as you do on Sundays. I would call… but I cannot. And no one can enjoy those chocolate chip cookies and what was more valuable, the gift of a bag of your cookies. Mom […]
- 2014
- A New ds106 Daily Create Tweet Clock cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by ihave3kids GNA had a good idea for the ds106 Daily Create scheduling… @cogdog just rappin here… How would it be to have the daily create bot tweet out more than once a day? For multiple TZs (lifestyles)? — GNA Garcia (@DrGarcia) February 8, 2014 […]
- 2013
- Memory Cookies cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Today marks two years since my Mom was around for a birthday; February 2011 was the last time I saw her. Yes she made cookies while I was there, yes we laughed, yes I put her on my web site with audio of her talking about baking […]
- Menu-izing ds106 Assignments Site Ir’s been fun to do some redesign and alignment of the ds106 web sites. I’ve long had an interest in trying to make the ds106 Assignments site into more of a template that could be used to create similar sites, and that just got a little bit closer to possibility. The entire 106 fleet is […]
- 2012
- Happy Butterflyday cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Today would have been my Mom’s 83rd Birthday, and in honor of her memory and love of butterflies, I asked Tim Owens to do a Makerbot print of a butterfly ornament. If you want to a description of her belief about butterflies, listen to this […]
- Dominoe Looking Across Texas, Time, Space… cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Reaching a bit into the past for today’s Daily Create "a photo that represents that happiest or most memorable moment in your life." As an absolute for "happiest" I find that impossible, so let’s reach into the hat. Having driven across Texas twice in the last 3 […]
- 2011
- Lecture by Bava cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I feel like this just listening to the live audio stream; I can only imagine the full force gale of being in the ds106 class with The Bavanator. Share this barking on social media
- Has Your Photography Improved via the Daily Shoot? I wanna know cc licensed flickr photo shared by Adam Melancon I’m doing a presentation at ITC 2011 on some parallels between photography and learning- a piece of that is using the independent learning, feedback, and regular process of The Daily Shoot is an example to look at. In one part, I would like to show some examples […]
- 2010
- Certifying Mom Strange as it sounds, today I had to email my Mom a scanned copy of a copy of my own birth certificate to prove her own birth record. And perhaps the most challenging was helping her decode the email attachment so she could print the record. It goes like this. Her Florida drivers license is […]
- 2007
- Now That’s Text To Speech Oddcast provides animated avatars on web pages that can speak and animate from text content. I was recently send a link to a demo where you can pay with it, and hastily recorded the screencast below (she seemed slow to respond on my first try, so you see the results when I pressed “Talk” repeatedly). […]
- CNN Big Picture Maps Stories It might have been on c|net’s site for 8 years, but I just randomly discovered their “Big Picture” feature — by attaching associated links form their stories, this flash app can create a visual map, showing connected stories or companies featured on their site: For every story published, News.com editors and reporters included relevant links […]
- 2006
- What’s That Doing There? I use NetNewsWire on sometimes an hourly or minutely basis to check my RSS sources. There is this thing off to the right of the menu bar for “Sites Drawer” that I hit only by mistake when trying to activate the window. It’s a set up RSS feeds provided in the software, likely in case […]
- Dude, Where’s My Rain? I’m in lovely Vancouver, BC. I had heard their winter was one of record setting rainfall, so coming from the Arizona desert where we’ve had the opposite problem (111 days and counting), I was enchanted by the notion of seeing the spectacle of water falling from the sky. No deal. Stepping off the plane was […]
- Vote Rubber Chicken Again, on the read/Write web, there is a place for everything. Episode II: Attack of the Cluckers is documenting the ascending politcal career opf Brother Clucker, who appears to be running for President under the “Not So Fowl” party. I only squandered some time here because Tim Lauer had posted on Will Richard’s Revinvention post, […]
- 2005
- Would You Like Fries With That? Just got a headset for doing audio chatting… too much feedback from the laptop speakers and crappy built in micorphone. C’mon Skype me! “How about a super kids meal? C’mom, trans-fats are fun”I never worked fast food 😉 Share this barking on social media
- 2004
- ePortfolio System Just Up and Running We had a burst of interest after our October 2002 Electronic Portfolio Dialogue Day, but there has been a long lapse in our efforts, with some fall out from a not so great experience with an external project. But just in about the last 3 days, we have started a new experiment, running a test […]
- Thumbs Up for Our Maricopa Bloggers It will take a few more days to compile notes, but the reaction and participation at our Ocotillo Online Learning Group this past Friday was very positive. This was obviously brand new territory for many of our faculty, and we had to clarify a bit on what are blogs, why are they different form discussion […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 23 posts previously published on February 8th
- 2021
- 50 Year Joslin Medal… Sweet (Splenda-like) It took more than 3 months to get here, but having waiting 50 years, well I’m patient. Within a fancy red velvet covered box I got my Joslin Center Medal for having lived with Type 1 Diabetes for 50 years (that line was crossed in late October 2020). The details were spelled out when I […] ➡
- 2019
- 1-2-3 Annotating the Intent This seems by my time to working on projects using web annotating. As noted early, we are planning more extensive use of hypothes.is in netnarr but the really Big Show is taking off this week, the project with Gardner Campbell on Annotating Doug Engelbart’s Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Some of the background has […] ➡
- 2018
- Episode 3 of the Puerto Rico Connection: Raiders of the Lost Tape By day he’s an ordinary computer science professor at Universidad Sagrado del Corazon, but once he puts that hat on, it’s adventure time for… Puerto Rico Jones? Indiana Vantaggiato? I’ve been thinking it’s time to record a new podcast with Antonio Vantaggiato, and in a few DMs he asked what about the last one we […] ➡
- 2016
- Best of Show in Bookmarking A post earlier this week on social bookmarking garnered the kind of comments that make me feel like it’s the edublogosphere of 2005. Talk about retro! Thanks to all. One thing that I have realized is that there are different goals in bookmarking… Personal organizing of bookmarks. Almost any tool mentioned and more would work, […] ➡
- I Connect With a Little Help From My Friends The email from Maha Bali came the night before I left for my trip to Puerto Rico, a red-eye flickt on February 1. She was asking people to join the Virtually Connecting event planned for the EDUCAUSE ELI meeting: Rebecca’s bday is Feb 2nd and we were hoping to surprise her during a Virtually Connecting […] ➡
- 2015
- We Are Lesser World Without George, Without GeoDuckie The word came via Bryan Alexander’s blog last night that a great spirit of curiosity, interest, creativity has left this world, note of it too on his daughter’s blog. George has gone through numerous health challenges; the photo above was from the time in 2011 I was doing my long odyssey trip and visited and […] ➡
- A Taste of Honey and Cookies It’s your birthday today Mom, and all I got you was a blog post. Again. I bet you are making cookies, as you do on Sundays. I would call… but I cannot. And no one can enjoy those chocolate chip cookies and what was more valuable, the gift of a bag of your cookies. Mom […] ➡
- 2014
- A New ds106 Daily Create Tweet Clock cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by ihave3kids GNA had a good idea for the ds106 Daily Create scheduling… @cogdog just rappin here… How would it be to have the daily create bot tweet out more than once a day? For multiple TZs (lifestyles)? — GNA Garcia (@DrGarcia) February 8, 2014 […] ➡
- 2013
- Memory Cookies cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Today marks two years since my Mom was around for a birthday; February 2011 was the last time I saw her. Yes she made cookies while I was there, yes we laughed, yes I put her on my web site with audio of her talking about baking […] ➡
- Menu-izing ds106 Assignments Site Ir’s been fun to do some redesign and alignment of the ds106 web sites. I’ve long had an interest in trying to make the ds106 Assignments site into more of a template that could be used to create similar sites, and that just got a little bit closer to possibility. The entire 106 fleet is […] ➡
- 2012
- Happy Butterflyday cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Today would have been my Mom’s 83rd Birthday, and in honor of her memory and love of butterflies, I asked Tim Owens to do a Makerbot print of a butterfly ornament. If you want to a description of her belief about butterflies, listen to this […] ➡
- Dominoe Looking Across Texas, Time, Space… cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Reaching a bit into the past for today’s Daily Create "a photo that represents that happiest or most memorable moment in your life." As an absolute for "happiest" I find that impossible, so let’s reach into the hat. Having driven across Texas twice in the last 3 […] ➡
- 2011
- Lecture by Bava cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I feel like this just listening to the live audio stream; I can only imagine the full force gale of being in the ds106 class with The Bavanator. Share this barking on social media ➡
- Has Your Photography Improved via the Daily Shoot? I wanna know cc licensed flickr photo shared by Adam Melancon I’m doing a presentation at ITC 2011 on some parallels between photography and learning- a piece of that is using the independent learning, feedback, and regular process of The Daily Shoot is an example to look at. In one part, I would like to show some examples […] ➡
- 2010
- Certifying Mom Strange as it sounds, today I had to email my Mom a scanned copy of a copy of my own birth certificate to prove her own birth record. And perhaps the most challenging was helping her decode the email attachment so she could print the record. It goes like this. Her Florida drivers license is […] ➡
- 2007
- Now That’s Text To Speech Oddcast provides animated avatars on web pages that can speak and animate from text content. I was recently send a link to a demo where you can pay with it, and hastily recorded the screencast below (she seemed slow to respond on my first try, so you see the results when I pressed “Talk” repeatedly). […] ➡
- CNN Big Picture Maps Stories It might have been on c|net’s site for 8 years, but I just randomly discovered their “Big Picture” feature — by attaching associated links form their stories, this flash app can create a visual map, showing connected stories or companies featured on their site: For every story published, News.com editors and reporters included relevant links […] ➡
- 2006
- What’s That Doing There? I use NetNewsWire on sometimes an hourly or minutely basis to check my RSS sources. There is this thing off to the right of the menu bar for “Sites Drawer” that I hit only by mistake when trying to activate the window. It’s a set up RSS feeds provided in the software, likely in case […] ➡
- Dude, Where’s My Rain? I’m in lovely Vancouver, BC. I had heard their winter was one of record setting rainfall, so coming from the Arizona desert where we’ve had the opposite problem (111 days and counting), I was enchanted by the notion of seeing the spectacle of water falling from the sky. No deal. Stepping off the plane was […] ➡
- Vote Rubber Chicken Again, on the read/Write web, there is a place for everything. Episode II: Attack of the Cluckers is documenting the ascending politcal career opf Brother Clucker, who appears to be running for President under the “Not So Fowl” party. I only squandered some time here because Tim Lauer had posted on Will Richard’s Revinvention post, […] ➡
- 2005
- Would You Like Fries With That? Just got a headset for doing audio chatting… too much feedback from the laptop speakers and crappy built in micorphone. C’mon Skype me! “How about a super kids meal? C’mom, trans-fats are fun”I never worked fast food 😉 Share this barking on social media ➡
- 2004
- ePortfolio System Just Up and Running We had a burst of interest after our October 2002 Electronic Portfolio Dialogue Day, but there has been a long lapse in our efforts, with some fall out from a not so great experience with an external project. But just in about the last 3 days, we have started a new experiment, running a test […] ➡
- Thumbs Up for Our Maricopa Bloggers It will take a few more days to compile notes, but the reaction and participation at our Ocotillo Online Learning Group this past Friday was very positive. This was obviously brand new territory for many of our faculty, and we had to clarify a bit on what are blogs, why are they different form discussion […] ➡
// 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.
