“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 15th
- 2013
- ds106 Daily Create Challenge (15): Tabloid News- Pearson Acquires ds106! cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Leeky-Boy It is going to be hard to top this headline… but that is the goal of today’s ds106 Daily Create, a writing challenge: Write a tabloid headline for ds106 and the opening sensational paragraph Tabloids, oh yeah. My all time favorite headline was “Female […]
- 2012
- Day 3: What’s On Channel 106? Day 3 of the Seven Day Daily Create Challenge now raises the ante- after day 1 and day 2 of drawing and photographery (easy peasy), we have a video challenge. Will they hang on? Apparently so, I count 23 in the hopper for Day 3, which is Show us what is on cable channel ds106 […]
- 2010
- PLNs and OERs and TLAs make Me Want To… cc licensed flickr photo shared by cutglassdecanter Me barking (or barfing) about un-necessary (to me) Three Letter Acronyms is nothing new around here. And to be the honest, they cause more shrugs, yawns, than upchucks. Scott knows the sound of my tired old saw startting up. I might be boring myself. But I love this […]
- 2009
- Getting Around Google Search’s Theft of Copiable URLs cc licensed flickr photo shared by lamont_cranston One of my primary uses of Google Search is locating URLs for web pages I am creating, blog posts, etc. The way Google outputs search results in a PITA as the links to the results are obfuscated in redirects through google (things they do to harvest our actions). […]
- 2007
- Make That 9,999 I pretty much just delete most twitter friends requests… I already track most of the folks I want to. But after about the 6th or 7th “Xxxxxx is following you” message from the same person, I got a creepy feeling like someone was breathing bad breath down my neck. If I have little patience for […]
- 3 Graphics + 1 XML Edit: Skin Your Twittercamp Okay, tonight’s blog parade is back to back twitter-a-thon. Among the tweets, Darren mentioned getting Twittercamp to run on his laptop. I chimed in a smart remark about stepping it up a notch and modifying the app with a custom skin. Oops, I may have jumped ahead. Twittercamp is a nifty desktop application created with […]
- 2005
- Another Staid Organization That Just Does Not Get It Just by publishing this gack, the Chronicle of Higher Education shows its speaks with an accent of digital immigrants. “So Dr. Brontosaurus, it is 10 minutes before the end of the Jurassic Period, what are you going to do?” “Nothing… why should I?.” Share this barking on social media
- 2004
- ePortfolio Survey Results (inside an ePort) Thanks to six of you who took up my offer to complete a silly survey inside my eportfolio. Well, there is one ringer in there, at least. And someone else got very serious about answering the open ended questions, but helped us clear up a bug. So not only can you create a survey to […]
- Nice PHP, with Class: FeedCreator FeedCreator.class.php– File this one away for future or near future code use. FeedCreator.class.php provides an easy way to create RSS feeds from within PHP using ease to use classes. * creates valid feeds according to RSS 0.91, 1.0 or 2.0 as well as PIE 0.1 (deprecated), OPML 1.0, Unix mbox and ATOM 0.3 format. * […]
- Phone Cam Fine Art: SENT Taking place in Los Angeles starting July 10, 2004, SENT brings perhaps your cheesy phone camera snapshots to a level of fine art? Images will be invited to be submitted by the public. It looks like it may be too let to send your phone snaps, but stay tuned to see the results. SENT will […]
- Small Pieces (Not So?) Loosely Joined (and already spammed) Our NMC 2004 Small Pieces session intended to make a case for creating effective net-based collaboration using a discrete set of free tools, not so tightly controlled. This was fine, fun, and (frilly), but I wanted to describe here how we are trying to implement this for some real work. We are headed into the […]
- 2003
- Splitting Up MT Category Archives I absolutely love MovableType for publishing this weblog, and know there is quite a bit more to dig into. One thing that has bothered me is in creating my category archives, they potentially have no end in sight for how long they will get to be. They just grow and grow as you add more […]
- Taking a Dog Nap July 25-27 Cogdogblog will be off-line between July 24 (6:00 pm PST) to July 28 (7:00 AM PST). There is some new power generator going in the building, and they are pulling the plug on all computers, networks, and servers. What will we do? Take a blog-break and going outside to chase some cats 😉 Share this […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 13 posts previously published on July 15th
- 2013
- 2012
- Day 3: What’s On Channel 106? Day 3 of the Seven Day Daily Create Challenge now raises the ante- after day 1 and day 2 of drawing and photographery (easy peasy), we have a video challenge. Will they hang on? Apparently so, I count 23 in the hopper for Day 3, which is Show us what is on cable channel ds106 […] ➡
- 2010
- PLNs and OERs and TLAs make Me Want To… cc licensed flickr photo shared by cutglassdecanter Me barking (or barfing) about un-necessary (to me) Three Letter Acronyms is nothing new around here. And to be the honest, they cause more shrugs, yawns, than upchucks. Scott knows the sound of my tired old saw startting up. I might be boring myself. But I love this […] ➡
- 2009
- Getting Around Google Search’s Theft of Copiable URLs cc licensed flickr photo shared by lamont_cranston One of my primary uses of Google Search is locating URLs for web pages I am creating, blog posts, etc. The way Google outputs search results in a PITA as the links to the results are obfuscated in redirects through google (things they do to harvest our actions). […] ➡
- 2007
- Make That 9,999 I pretty much just delete most twitter friends requests… I already track most of the folks I want to. But after about the 6th or 7th “Xxxxxx is following you” message from the same person, I got a creepy feeling like someone was breathing bad breath down my neck. If I have little patience for […] ➡
- 3 Graphics + 1 XML Edit: Skin Your Twittercamp Okay, tonight’s blog parade is back to back twitter-a-thon. Among the tweets, Darren mentioned getting Twittercamp to run on his laptop. I chimed in a smart remark about stepping it up a notch and modifying the app with a custom skin. Oops, I may have jumped ahead. Twittercamp is a nifty desktop application created with […] ➡
- 2005
- Another Staid Organization That Just Does Not Get It Just by publishing this gack, the Chronicle of Higher Education shows its speaks with an accent of digital immigrants. “So Dr. Brontosaurus, it is 10 minutes before the end of the Jurassic Period, what are you going to do?” “Nothing… why should I?.” Share this barking on social media ➡
- 2004
- ePortfolio Survey Results (inside an ePort) Thanks to six of you who took up my offer to complete a silly survey inside my eportfolio. Well, there is one ringer in there, at least. And someone else got very serious about answering the open ended questions, but helped us clear up a bug. So not only can you create a survey to […] ➡
- Nice PHP, with Class: FeedCreator FeedCreator.class.php– File this one away for future or near future code use. FeedCreator.class.php provides an easy way to create RSS feeds from within PHP using ease to use classes. * creates valid feeds according to RSS 0.91, 1.0 or 2.0 as well as PIE 0.1 (deprecated), OPML 1.0, Unix mbox and ATOM 0.3 format. * […] ➡
- Phone Cam Fine Art: SENT Taking place in Los Angeles starting July 10, 2004, SENT brings perhaps your cheesy phone camera snapshots to a level of fine art? Images will be invited to be submitted by the public. It looks like it may be too let to send your phone snaps, but stay tuned to see the results. SENT will […] ➡
- Small Pieces (Not So?) Loosely Joined (and already spammed) Our NMC 2004 Small Pieces session intended to make a case for creating effective net-based collaboration using a discrete set of free tools, not so tightly controlled. This was fine, fun, and (frilly), but I wanted to describe here how we are trying to implement this for some real work. We are headed into the […] ➡
- 2003
- Splitting Up MT Category Archives I absolutely love MovableType for publishing this weblog, and know there is quite a bit more to dig into. One thing that has bothered me is in creating my category archives, they potentially have no end in sight for how long they will get to be. They just grow and grow as you add more […] ➡
- Taking a Dog Nap July 25-27 Cogdogblog will be off-line between July 24 (6:00 pm PST) to July 28 (7:00 AM PST). There is some new power generator going in the building, and they are pulling the plug on all computers, networks, and servers. What will we do? Take a blog-break and going outside to chase some cats 😉 Share this […] ➡
// 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.
