“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 15 posts previously published on January 27th
- 2018
- It’s Fun, It’s Here! Highlights Theme for WordPress The only place I ever saw Highlights for Children magazine was at my dentist office, a short distraction while waiting for the drilling and fat fingers of weird old Dr Cooper. The tagline of the magazine was “Fun With a Purpose”. But no connection here, except the name, it’s a brand new WordPress theme I […]
- 2017
- Four Elements Inscribing Four Elements In the second week of Networked Narratives I introduced a small visual assignment. My intent was to ask students to use their cameras not their google, and also to do so a bit more deliberately than snapshots (the assignment links to resources under On Becoming Better Photographers). With the alchemy theme in mind, I asked […]
- 2016
- Today on High Noon Radio Hour We Talk to Real Book Author
We got the beans on and some cowperson coffee warmin’ the kettle. At high noon today MT (MY Time, no silly Mountain Time) we have our next installment of Western106 High Noon Radio. Don’t know ...
- Palm Reading My Future for 2016 I’m not a futurist, but I can see about 45 days into the future something new and exciting. And yes, from the image above, this as a “c” and a “c” into it. Do not ask about the symbolism of the cuts on my hand, that was done earlier with a sharp bread knife and […]
- 2015
- 2011
- When ds106 Radio Sucks You In cc licensed flickr photo shared by leo_irakliotis When Jim Groom hatched the Digital Story open course I bet he never envisioned the wonderfully weird, wild, and open free form radio happening these past few days at radio ds106. It would look like utter chaos to anyone looking in, which is good, cause it is. It […]
- 2010
- Ye Old WordPress Blog Search Thingie I have an old JavaScript bookmark tool I made five years ago– it allows me, from no matter where I am on the web, to either select some text in a page (or enter in a box) and run a search for it in my own blog. This came from realizing that the basic wordpress […]
- 2009
- Argue it on a Map Just stumbled across aMap, a little web app for setting up polarized discussions that can be done in a little map form, or as they say: aMap is short for “˜argument map’. The idea’s very simple – to promote the art of arguing by mapping out complex debates in a simple visual format. Sure you […]
- 2006
- No Celebration / Flickrtation The word has sneaked out a bit earlier than Brian and I had planned on the flickr-housed presentation we are doing Monday at the EDUCAUSE ELI meeting in San Diego. Beyond the Blog: ready For Prime Time was pitched at a look at where weblogs have gone since (slightly?) passing the novelty “aren’t the just […]
- 2005
- The Basket is Good (but way inside the 3 point line) From Bore Me, here is a video clip of a bunch of guys who toss a cheerleader through a basketball hoop. There is a lot of surlpus time out there working in strange ways. What else can be said? And can someone help me understand The Two Headed Dog? (from the “I’m feeling old department”). […]
- Sigh, Cancel The Jubilation Oh well, might as cancel the jubilation over Google’s “nofollow” announcement. Ben Hammersley spells out the sobering reality in “Let no fellow nofollow, lest we all lie fallow”: I’m deeply mystified by the hallelujahs bursting forth about Google’s rel=”nofollow” method of preventing comment spam. The idea being that comment spammers will leave your own site […]
- It’s About Time I Read This For the last year or more I have been blabbering about the “small pieces of technology loosely joined”, so it was extremely overdue that I actually read the book I pilfered the phrase from. So thanks to a holiday gift card from Borders (which is really just a portal to Amazon) just fresh off the […]
- Best 404 In a While Following a link in an email notification from Jay Allen‘s Comment Spam web site, I came across the best “404 Document Not Found” page I’ve seen in a while: For more fun things like this, or if you have some large amounts of time to idle away, check out the 404 Research Lab, which beyond […]
- 2004
- And My Right Little Toe is a Weblog A recent barking about “everything is a learning object”, including my left big toe got some interesting responses– sometimes you can slave over an important blogged item and get nary a trackback, but toss out something silly and it ends up down under somewhere. So part two to this escapade is “Everything is a weblog” […]
- Not So Great Moments in Software Design #945,562 It is happening again. If you are like me, you have spent a chunk of time every few hours recently deleting piles of messages from email virus protection systems elsewhere, all claiming that I sent them infected emails (the latest viral attachment crud, W32.Novarg.A@mm, yum what a name). Nothing has changed since September 9, when […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 15 posts previously published on January 27th
- 2018
- It’s Fun, It’s Here! Highlights Theme for WordPress The only place I ever saw Highlights for Children magazine was at my dentist office, a short distraction while waiting for the drilling and fat fingers of weird old Dr Cooper. The tagline of the magazine was “Fun With a Purpose”. But no connection here, except the name, it’s a brand new WordPress theme I […] ➡
- 2017
- Four Elements Inscribing Four Elements In the second week of Networked Narratives I introduced a small visual assignment. My intent was to ask students to use their cameras not their google, and also to do so a bit more deliberately than snapshots (the assignment links to resources under On Becoming Better Photographers). With the alchemy theme in mind, I asked […] ➡
- 2016
- Today on High Noon Radio Hour We Talk to Real Book Author
We got the beans on and some cowperson coffee warmin’ the kettle. At high noon today MT (MY Time, no silly Mountain Time) we have our next installment of Western106 High Noon Radio. Don’t know ...
➡ - Palm Reading My Future for 2016 I’m not a futurist, but I can see about 45 days into the future something new and exciting. And yes, from the image above, this as a “c” and a “c” into it. Do not ask about the symbolism of the cuts on my hand, that was done earlier with a sharp bread knife and […] ➡
- 2015
- 2011
- When ds106 Radio Sucks You In cc licensed flickr photo shared by leo_irakliotis When Jim Groom hatched the Digital Story open course I bet he never envisioned the wonderfully weird, wild, and open free form radio happening these past few days at radio ds106. It would look like utter chaos to anyone looking in, which is good, cause it is. It […] ➡
- 2010
- Ye Old WordPress Blog Search Thingie I have an old JavaScript bookmark tool I made five years ago– it allows me, from no matter where I am on the web, to either select some text in a page (or enter in a box) and run a search for it in my own blog. This came from realizing that the basic wordpress […] ➡
- 2009
- Argue it on a Map Just stumbled across aMap, a little web app for setting up polarized discussions that can be done in a little map form, or as they say: aMap is short for “˜argument map’. The idea’s very simple – to promote the art of arguing by mapping out complex debates in a simple visual format. Sure you […] ➡
- 2006
- No Celebration / Flickrtation The word has sneaked out a bit earlier than Brian and I had planned on the flickr-housed presentation we are doing Monday at the EDUCAUSE ELI meeting in San Diego. Beyond the Blog: ready For Prime Time was pitched at a look at where weblogs have gone since (slightly?) passing the novelty “aren’t the just […] ➡
- 2005
- The Basket is Good (but way inside the 3 point line) From Bore Me, here is a video clip of a bunch of guys who toss a cheerleader through a basketball hoop. There is a lot of surlpus time out there working in strange ways. What else can be said? And can someone help me understand The Two Headed Dog? (from the “I’m feeling old department”). […] ➡
- Sigh, Cancel The Jubilation Oh well, might as cancel the jubilation over Google’s “nofollow” announcement. Ben Hammersley spells out the sobering reality in “Let no fellow nofollow, lest we all lie fallow”: I’m deeply mystified by the hallelujahs bursting forth about Google’s rel=”nofollow” method of preventing comment spam. The idea being that comment spammers will leave your own site […] ➡
- It’s About Time I Read This For the last year or more I have been blabbering about the “small pieces of technology loosely joined”, so it was extremely overdue that I actually read the book I pilfered the phrase from. So thanks to a holiday gift card from Borders (which is really just a portal to Amazon) just fresh off the […] ➡
- Best 404 In a While Following a link in an email notification from Jay Allen‘s Comment Spam web site, I came across the best “404 Document Not Found” page I’ve seen in a while: For more fun things like this, or if you have some large amounts of time to idle away, check out the 404 Research Lab, which beyond […] ➡
- 2004
- And My Right Little Toe is a Weblog A recent barking about “everything is a learning object”, including my left big toe got some interesting responses– sometimes you can slave over an important blogged item and get nary a trackback, but toss out something silly and it ends up down under somewhere. So part two to this escapade is “Everything is a weblog” […] ➡
- Not So Great Moments in Software Design #945,562 It is happening again. If you are like me, you have spent a chunk of time every few hours recently deleting piles of messages from email virus protection systems elsewhere, all claiming that I sent them infected emails (the latest viral attachment crud, W32.Novarg.A@mm, yum what a name). Nothing has changed since September 9, when […] ➡
// 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.
