“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 14 posts previously published on August 18th
- 2017
- Extending, DoOOing in Ontario I’m just back from an intense but rewarding (best combo) of helping with three days of workshops for a new project supported by eCampus Ontario. This is the first attempt to capture some broader ideas, and is in the vein of what I tried to describe to participants as using a blog post to think […]
- 2016
- Scratching Hidden History How much history do we know of the exact place we live? What was going on at the place your home is sitting, say 100, 200 years ago? We literally walk around on hidden histories, not seeing, not even knowing them. Through an unexpected series of events, tonight I found myself for maybe 2 or […]
- 2014
- Ahlan wa sa’halan: Blogging in 1996 Through more twitter conversations with Maha Bali, my memory cells rekindled an early web project I did while working at the Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction (Maricopa Community Colleges). I might boast that I built something to help a faculty member blog (there ought to be some scare quotes). I’d really forgotten this, but […]
- 2013
- Updated Code Released for Five Card Flickr As of Mon, 19 Aug 2013 02:00:11 -0400 10518 Five Card stories have been created on this site from a pool of 13589 tagged photos. I have bot looked at all 10,000+ stories- this site has been humming along, for the most part un-attended for months and back to 2008. In some exchanges a week […]
- Reading Alone Together… Alone and Together cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Andrew Taylor I want to toss a big thanks to Ben Rimes for organizing and running the last few weeks the online reading group Book Club 106 with last week’s discussion being the wrap up for Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together. Like Ben and others, the group […]
- Get Out of Daily Create Free! Look ma, no guilt! cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine This is for of course today’s ds106 Daily Create: Create a pass or certificate that allows you to not complete this Daily Create. My free association mind went to Monopoly Chance and Community Chest cards, which are things well […]
- 2012
- StoryBox Presents I’ve still not come to a grand idea what to do with the media I collected last year in the StoryBox. Some I am using as I work on spinning new stories and tales in Cowbird (where I continue to lag a month behind last year’s schedule). One of the gifts that has continued since […]
- 2008
- WordCamp Takeaways photo credit: lordog Continuing the gastronomic theme for my WordCamp experience, here are a few quick things I took away from the experience (for complete coverage, see Andrew Mager’s live blogging) WordCamp’s t-shirt colors (brown this year) seem to follow directly the lead of Northern Voice 😉 Almost everyone I met was with some company, […]
- EduBloggin’ The Crowd at WordCamp To say I had a great time this past weekend at WordCamp would be an understatement. Beyond the gathering of 400 other WP junkies, there was getting to meet all the Automatticians (and fascinating to learn they work as a completely decentralized organization; 30 some employees strung across the US, Canada, Bulgaria, Australia, Japan…). And […]
- 2006
- The Only Way To Use My MacBookPro is Not to Use My MacBookPro To continue the flogging of a dead equine (yikes, I think I am boring myself)… To get the screen back on my MacBookPro, I have found that powering it down for somewhere greater than 5 hours seems to revive it (for an unknown amount of time). Yesterday, I let it rest for 3 hours, did […]
- 2005
- We’ve Cracked the Bottom 500 Sure, almost anyone can be one of the Feedster Top 500 blogs, but we are proud of their private message assuring us we were firmly based in the counter part Bottom 500, based on our poor spelling, endless babbling, dog obsession, weak grammar, and the fact we live in a warm climate. So we do […]
- “Next Thing You Know, Grommit, They Will Prove The Moon Is NOT Made of Cheese!” If you hear things repeated enough and from different sources, they grow into self truths, and next thing you know you help to spread them. In a week it is an Urban Legend. It’s interesting to see how some new tools can help poke holes in folk tales. Have you ever repeated the old adage […]
- 2004
- RSS Feeds for Comments/Trackbacks Per Blog Post I cannot remember why I started down this MT template path, but it was a fun journey. Somehow I stumbled into Phil Ringnalda’s explanation on how to create RSS feeds for individual entries and comments. This seemed interesting- often when you write a comment to someone else’s blog, there is no way to follow a […]
- Blogdigger- Wow Within three hours of writing yesterday about Blogdigger (an RSS feed combiner that returns a group of feeds as a single feed), I got a nice comment from Greg at Bloggdigger who let me know that the filtering tools were still being tinkered. It’s rewarding to get direct responses like that from the folks directly […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 14 posts previously published on August 18th
- 2017
- Extending, DoOOing in Ontario I’m just back from an intense but rewarding (best combo) of helping with three days of workshops for a new project supported by eCampus Ontario. This is the first attempt to capture some broader ideas, and is in the vein of what I tried to describe to participants as using a blog post to think […] ➡
- 2016
- Scratching Hidden History How much history do we know of the exact place we live? What was going on at the place your home is sitting, say 100, 200 years ago? We literally walk around on hidden histories, not seeing, not even knowing them. Through an unexpected series of events, tonight I found myself for maybe 2 or […] ➡
- 2014
- Ahlan wa sa’halan: Blogging in 1996 Through more twitter conversations with Maha Bali, my memory cells rekindled an early web project I did while working at the Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction (Maricopa Community Colleges). I might boast that I built something to help a faculty member blog (there ought to be some scare quotes). I’d really forgotten this, but […] ➡
- 2013
- Updated Code Released for Five Card Flickr As of Mon, 19 Aug 2013 02:00:11 -0400 10518 Five Card stories have been created on this site from a pool of 13589 tagged photos. I have bot looked at all 10,000+ stories- this site has been humming along, for the most part un-attended for months and back to 2008. In some exchanges a week […] ➡
- Reading Alone Together… Alone and Together cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Andrew Taylor I want to toss a big thanks to Ben Rimes for organizing and running the last few weeks the online reading group Book Club 106 with last week’s discussion being the wrap up for Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together. Like Ben and others, the group […] ➡
- Get Out of Daily Create Free! Look ma, no guilt! cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine This is for of course today’s ds106 Daily Create: Create a pass or certificate that allows you to not complete this Daily Create. My free association mind went to Monopoly Chance and Community Chest cards, which are things well […] ➡
- 2012
- StoryBox Presents I’ve still not come to a grand idea what to do with the media I collected last year in the StoryBox. Some I am using as I work on spinning new stories and tales in Cowbird (where I continue to lag a month behind last year’s schedule). One of the gifts that has continued since […] ➡
- 2008
- WordCamp Takeaways photo credit: lordog Continuing the gastronomic theme for my WordCamp experience, here are a few quick things I took away from the experience (for complete coverage, see Andrew Mager’s live blogging) WordCamp’s t-shirt colors (brown this year) seem to follow directly the lead of Northern Voice 😉 Almost everyone I met was with some company, […] ➡
- EduBloggin’ The Crowd at WordCamp To say I had a great time this past weekend at WordCamp would be an understatement. Beyond the gathering of 400 other WP junkies, there was getting to meet all the Automatticians (and fascinating to learn they work as a completely decentralized organization; 30 some employees strung across the US, Canada, Bulgaria, Australia, Japan…). And […] ➡
- 2006
- The Only Way To Use My MacBookPro is Not to Use My MacBookPro To continue the flogging of a dead equine (yikes, I think I am boring myself)… To get the screen back on my MacBookPro, I have found that powering it down for somewhere greater than 5 hours seems to revive it (for an unknown amount of time). Yesterday, I let it rest for 3 hours, did […] ➡
- 2005
- We’ve Cracked the Bottom 500 Sure, almost anyone can be one of the Feedster Top 500 blogs, but we are proud of their private message assuring us we were firmly based in the counter part Bottom 500, based on our poor spelling, endless babbling, dog obsession, weak grammar, and the fact we live in a warm climate. So we do […] ➡
- “Next Thing You Know, Grommit, They Will Prove The Moon Is NOT Made of Cheese!” If you hear things repeated enough and from different sources, they grow into self truths, and next thing you know you help to spread them. In a week it is an Urban Legend. It’s interesting to see how some new tools can help poke holes in folk tales. Have you ever repeated the old adage […] ➡
- 2004
- RSS Feeds for Comments/Trackbacks Per Blog Post I cannot remember why I started down this MT template path, but it was a fun journey. Somehow I stumbled into Phil Ringnalda’s explanation on how to create RSS feeds for individual entries and comments. This seemed interesting- often when you write a comment to someone else’s blog, there is no way to follow a […] ➡
- Blogdigger- Wow Within three hours of writing yesterday about Blogdigger (an RSS feed combiner that returns a group of feeds as a single feed), I got a nice comment from Greg at Bloggdigger who let me know that the filtering tools were still being tinkered. It’s rewarding to get direct responses like that from the folks directly […] ➡
// 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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