“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 13 posts previously published on July 3rd
- 2018
- We Did a Thing (a month ago) A lot of things in my life have played out in this blog, in flickr photos, in tweets. But that’s not everything. Not by far. A wonderful new part of my life, a long vet that has been in development offline a long while, came on a month ago, when I stood on a cottage […]
- 2016
- 2013
- Sheeeeeeeeeeeit… SubToMe! In reading Stephen Downe’s post on RSS Changeover Day Experiences, my radar got curious from a link in the first comment for SubToMe. It’s for a free code to do what browsers should do, should have done, and never really did- make it easy to subscribe to sites with RSS feeds. As Clay Davis would […]
- 2011
- Fly With Roy I’m relaxing in a coffee shop in Golden, Colorado, checking the ds106 streams and missing the creative play. Seeing Jim’s efforts made me wonder if I could whip one together ove lunch. Since I am traveling, I was thinking maybe one of my photos might be a start point… Then I remembered Dr Garcia’s comment […]
- 2009
- Me and Farrah Got a Connection It’s interesting to get smidgens of insight into how people link to your blog. For a window of time last week I saw an interesting pattern (when was traveling and missed out on the week of celebrity deaths). Look at the keyword searches people used in Google to get to CogDogBlog: It’s all Farrah all […]
- Swinging a Dead Cat at Video Settings for YouTube In some of my recent attempts to get good video on YouTube, I seemed to have been swinging wildly and missing. MPEG-4 video that looked great on my desk top ended up with the voice out of sync with the moving lips. Before going about it again, I sought out (via the Oracle) suggested settings […]
- Got My Mophie Mojo All the video/app/being-on-the-net-anywhere fun of the iPhone comes at a cost- the limits of its battery life. And yes, you cannot carry a spare. Since I have some long distance travel I’ve been interested in some for the battery boosters for the iDevices. I was almost ready to go for the Richard Solo device— it […]
- 2007
- 2006
- blufr = addictive Via David Weinberger’s blog, came a reference to a time eating web site. Blufr (“bruising your ego one blff at a time”) is more or less a true or false game at various “facts” form Answers.com– the addictive hook is tat each “way” / “no way” right answer bumps you points, you can post links […]
- When There’s No About in the About From the dark ages of building web resource collections, I have always stressed the importance of having 1-2 sentences to describe what a web site is about– other wise, what you end with is a linkatorium, a laundry list of URLs or site titles and no context. And this is that is key for me, […]
- 2004
- RSS Equalizer- Order Before Midnight Tonight and Get the Free Turnip Twaddler! Beware of long scrolling web sites that start with: Attention: If you would like to get your Web pages to the top of search results (with very little effort), this letter is for you… “Discover An Amazing ‘Technology’ That Will Give You An Unfair Advantage Over Your Competitors And Increase Your Rankings… GUARANTEED!” with more […]
- Real Heros I am enjoying the last leg of a nice long vacation at our cabin in the pine forests near Strawberry, Arizona. Not unique in the west or elsewhere in the world, we are in the ninth year of a drought, and the forests are bone dry. Just 10 miles to the south, the Willow Wild […]
- Small Pieces Loosely Spammed (wiki grafiitti?) There are interesting threads to read on peeling the layers of RecentChanges in wikis. While reflecting on the Small Technologies Loosely Joined NMC 2004 session we did last month ion Vancouver, I noticed that someone had taken the effort to paste a bunch of porn URLs on the front page, and shortly there after, someone […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 13 posts previously published on July 3rd
- 2018
- We Did a Thing (a month ago) A lot of things in my life have played out in this blog, in flickr photos, in tweets. But that’s not everything. Not by far. A wonderful new part of my life, a long vet that has been in development offline a long while, came on a month ago, when I stood on a cottage […] ➡
- 2016
- 2013
- Sheeeeeeeeeeeit… SubToMe! In reading Stephen Downe’s post on RSS Changeover Day Experiences, my radar got curious from a link in the first comment for SubToMe. It’s for a free code to do what browsers should do, should have done, and never really did- make it easy to subscribe to sites with RSS feeds. As Clay Davis would […] ➡
- 2011
- Fly With Roy I’m relaxing in a coffee shop in Golden, Colorado, checking the ds106 streams and missing the creative play. Seeing Jim’s efforts made me wonder if I could whip one together ove lunch. Since I am traveling, I was thinking maybe one of my photos might be a start point… Then I remembered Dr Garcia’s comment […] ➡
- 2009
- Me and Farrah Got a Connection It’s interesting to get smidgens of insight into how people link to your blog. For a window of time last week I saw an interesting pattern (when was traveling and missed out on the week of celebrity deaths). Look at the keyword searches people used in Google to get to CogDogBlog: It’s all Farrah all […] ➡
- Swinging a Dead Cat at Video Settings for YouTube In some of my recent attempts to get good video on YouTube, I seemed to have been swinging wildly and missing. MPEG-4 video that looked great on my desk top ended up with the voice out of sync with the moving lips. Before going about it again, I sought out (via the Oracle) suggested settings […] ➡
- Got My Mophie Mojo All the video/app/being-on-the-net-anywhere fun of the iPhone comes at a cost- the limits of its battery life. And yes, you cannot carry a spare. Since I have some long distance travel I’ve been interested in some for the battery boosters for the iDevices. I was almost ready to go for the Richard Solo device— it […] ➡
- 2007
- 2006
- blufr = addictive Via David Weinberger’s blog, came a reference to a time eating web site. Blufr (“bruising your ego one blff at a time”) is more or less a true or false game at various “facts” form Answers.com– the addictive hook is tat each “way” / “no way” right answer bumps you points, you can post links […] ➡
- When There’s No About in the About From the dark ages of building web resource collections, I have always stressed the importance of having 1-2 sentences to describe what a web site is about– other wise, what you end with is a linkatorium, a laundry list of URLs or site titles and no context. And this is that is key for me, […] ➡
- 2004
- RSS Equalizer- Order Before Midnight Tonight and Get the Free Turnip Twaddler! Beware of long scrolling web sites that start with: Attention: If you would like to get your Web pages to the top of search results (with very little effort), this letter is for you… “Discover An Amazing ‘Technology’ That Will Give You An Unfair Advantage Over Your Competitors And Increase Your Rankings… GUARANTEED!” with more […] ➡
- Real Heros I am enjoying the last leg of a nice long vacation at our cabin in the pine forests near Strawberry, Arizona. Not unique in the west or elsewhere in the world, we are in the ninth year of a drought, and the forests are bone dry. Just 10 miles to the south, the Willow Wild […] ➡
- Small Pieces Loosely Spammed (wiki grafiitti?) There are interesting threads to read on peeling the layers of RecentChanges in wikis. While reflecting on the Small Technologies Loosely Joined NMC 2004 session we did last month ion Vancouver, I noticed that someone had taken the effort to paste a bunch of porn URLs on the front page, and shortly there after, someone […] ➡
// 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.
