“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 June 29th
- 2018
- Ideating for July’s @ontarioextend Domain Camp It’s way late in the day before a long weekend, but just to jog some notes down to pick up next week. Besides spawning an Ontario Extend Daily Extend challenge for July I have more plans for the month. Participants in the first cohort training were set up with web domains with Reclaim Hosting sponsored […]
- Pechasplot? Crude Duct Taped WordPress Random Image API I’ve got a lot of catching up to do with Tom Woodward on building sites that draw content from WordPress ones via the API but I’ve got reason and interest to start. This has been a back of the mind idea for while for my sites that rely on random images drawn from the flickr […]
- Sunday! Sunday! Sergeant Hulka on Duty for the @OntarioExtend Daily Extend 31 Day Challenge He talks tough, but he just wants you to be creative and join a challenge to do all 31 Daily Extends in July. Are you ready for the @ontarioextend Daily Extend July Challenge? Are you tough enough to go 31 for 31? Stay tuned, Sergeant Hulka is preparing for you! pic.twitter.com/XXTQOj4BkI — Alan Levine (@cogdog) […]
- 2011
- Running with the Sheep cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It’s more fluffy than running with the bulls. The last few days I have enjoyed a relaxing times at my friend’s Ken and Oggie’s farm in Paonio Colorado- they have an amazing story themselves in how they are devoted to their flock of rare Black […]
- 2009
- Amongst the crap and spam of email comes a gift… cc licensed flickr photo shared by misterbisson Yep my internet grandchildren, Old CogDog remembers when e-mail was pretty much it for everything on online activity, long before junk mail, phishing, spam, twitter, facebook. blogs, heck before the web. It;s refreshing when something nice just lands in thr box, and makes you pause and smile. Today’s […]
- I Got ARRFFed at ED-MEDIA cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog That keynote speaker, is he talking to me? Yep. In his ED-MEDIA presentation on Beyond Management: The Personal Learning Environment, slide 14, Stephen describes the process that is at the core of his activity (16,000+ posts since 2001!), which he named in honor of little ole me as […]
- Hawaii 50+Ways I pulled out all the Hawaii in yer eye themes for the latest incarnation of my dog and dog show, presenting 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story for the EDMEDIA 2009 conference (all links mentioned in the show are just a scroll away from that link) It went fine, I had fun, people […]
- 2008
- Flickr Wordle Flickr Wordle by cogdogblog posted 29 Jun ’08, 9.26pm MDT PST on flickr Everybody and their mother blogger has noted Wordle, the lovely tag generator. I thigk I was one of the first to note it, but hey, who gives a flying fart about being web first except blog-o–ego-maniacs. Okay I was just google chatting […]
- Nigerian Spam Referencing Nigerian Spam I only like email spam when it is creatively subtle in cleverness– this one comes close. In this sneaky approach, the email references victims of Nigerian spammers with a supposed offer to submit for reimbursement courtesy of the government of Nigeria and the United Nations. So if you were really moronic enough to fall for […]
- 2006
- Feed2JSFuture Following up yesterday’s mess, just getting rafts of emails from people (rightfully) worried Feed2JS makes me heave large sighs. This was a nice little project, that started as something to fill my own needs, that I lofted out on the net… and all of a sudden people around the world are riding on it, small […]
- Feed2JSMess Right now the server running Feed2JS is down and out. I have only the most limited, around the corner and snake up a pole access, but the server is toasted until someone on their IT staff can go in the server room and hard start the server. It’s just a humble XServe getting yanked and […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 11 posts previously published on June 29th
- 2018
- Ideating for July’s @ontarioextend Domain Camp It’s way late in the day before a long weekend, but just to jog some notes down to pick up next week. Besides spawning an Ontario Extend Daily Extend challenge for July I have more plans for the month. Participants in the first cohort training were set up with web domains with Reclaim Hosting sponsored […] ➡
- Pechasplot? Crude Duct Taped WordPress Random Image API I’ve got a lot of catching up to do with Tom Woodward on building sites that draw content from WordPress ones via the API but I’ve got reason and interest to start. This has been a back of the mind idea for while for my sites that rely on random images drawn from the flickr […] ➡
- Sunday! Sunday! Sergeant Hulka on Duty for the @OntarioExtend Daily Extend 31 Day Challenge He talks tough, but he just wants you to be creative and join a challenge to do all 31 Daily Extends in July. Are you ready for the @ontarioextend Daily Extend July Challenge? Are you tough enough to go 31 for 31? Stay tuned, Sergeant Hulka is preparing for you! pic.twitter.com/XXTQOj4BkI — Alan Levine (@cogdog) […] ➡
- 2011
- Running with the Sheep cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It’s more fluffy than running with the bulls. The last few days I have enjoyed a relaxing times at my friend’s Ken and Oggie’s farm in Paonio Colorado- they have an amazing story themselves in how they are devoted to their flock of rare Black […] ➡
- 2009
- Amongst the crap and spam of email comes a gift… cc licensed flickr photo shared by misterbisson Yep my internet grandchildren, Old CogDog remembers when e-mail was pretty much it for everything on online activity, long before junk mail, phishing, spam, twitter, facebook. blogs, heck before the web. It;s refreshing when something nice just lands in thr box, and makes you pause and smile. Today’s […] ➡
- I Got ARRFFed at ED-MEDIA cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog That keynote speaker, is he talking to me? Yep. In his ED-MEDIA presentation on Beyond Management: The Personal Learning Environment, slide 14, Stephen describes the process that is at the core of his activity (16,000+ posts since 2001!), which he named in honor of little ole me as […] ➡
- Hawaii 50+Ways I pulled out all the Hawaii in yer eye themes for the latest incarnation of my dog and dog show, presenting 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story for the EDMEDIA 2009 conference (all links mentioned in the show are just a scroll away from that link) It went fine, I had fun, people […] ➡
- 2008
- Flickr Wordle Flickr Wordle by cogdogblog posted 29 Jun ’08, 9.26pm MDT PST on flickr Everybody and their mother blogger has noted Wordle, the lovely tag generator. I thigk I was one of the first to note it, but hey, who gives a flying fart about being web first except blog-o–ego-maniacs. Okay I was just google chatting […] ➡
- Nigerian Spam Referencing Nigerian Spam I only like email spam when it is creatively subtle in cleverness– this one comes close. In this sneaky approach, the email references victims of Nigerian spammers with a supposed offer to submit for reimbursement courtesy of the government of Nigeria and the United Nations. So if you were really moronic enough to fall for […] ➡
- 2006
- Feed2JSFuture Following up yesterday’s mess, just getting rafts of emails from people (rightfully) worried Feed2JS makes me heave large sighs. This was a nice little project, that started as something to fill my own needs, that I lofted out on the net… and all of a sudden people around the world are riding on it, small […] ➡
- Feed2JSMess Right now the server running Feed2JS is down and out. I have only the most limited, around the corner and snake up a pole access, but the server is toasted until someone on their IT staff can go in the server room and hard start the server. It’s just a humble XServe getting yanked and […] ➡
// 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.
