“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 10 posts previously published on September 3rd
- 2017
- Hey Cousin Bobby, Hi from Strawberry, Arizona The reminder from Google Calendar is stark “Cousin Bobby Klugman Y (1984)” That comes from family births/deaths/anniversaries I pulled from my Mom’s calendar after she passed away. “Y” means “yahrzeit” for the candles Jewish people light on the date marking a death. I think Bobby was my Dad’s cousin, his mom Helen was my grandmother’s […]
- 2014
- Don’t Blog Like My Brother https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS3GssVNdXw Should teaching/learning be this fun? Heck yeah. Yesterday, my blog brothers Jim “Click” Groom and Howard “Embed” Rheingold launched the first live session for Connected Courses and open connected course about teaching open connected courses (see recursion). The first two week segment we, the Connected Brothers, are running is the “Pre-course” meant to onboard […]
- 2013
- Mickey Has Lost His Head! Oh that dog! This is my contribution for today’s ds106 Daily Create assignment Create your headless ds106 portrait. Mickey is my long gone (11 years) Labrador Retriever that became my logo everywhere, on the blog, on Twitter, even on my arm: That is headFULL not headLESS. So I went back to the original photo the […]
- YouTube Breaks Tag Functionality. Internet Does Not Notice. Blog at 11. cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by maziar hooshmand I feel lonely on the internet… because I still hold on dearly tot he idea of tagging content as a means to organize across communities. It’s so 2002. At one time, people could tag videos on YouTube as a way to organize […]
- 2011
- Blown Away By #Cookielove cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog One of my mom’s recently acquired phrases was her being “blown away” by something positive, and I am sure those would be her words at seeing what by internet friends are doing in her honor tomorrow. Thanks to Martha Burtis and Giulia Forsythe (I think […]
- 2009
- A Place for Sharing Stories of Teachers/Heroes I routinely delete those emails (and rarely get to the bottom, the trash impulse comes quickly) that come in requesting me to blog about some software/web site/product… “This ain’t no request line, try WXYZ…” But one came this week that made my drop my routine (it’s got storytelling! web sharing!), because in the first sentence […]
- WP to Twitter + HashTag (an idea in search of a use) I had this idea to explore and honestly could not find a relevant use to even flesh it out, so am putting it out there in case others do. There are several tools you can use to have your blogs, when they publish posts, to automatically send a tweet out with the link. On this […]
- 2008
- Going Where I Have Been Going Where I Have Been by cogdogblog posted 3 Sep ’08, 12.36am MDT PST on flickr This is in the last hour of my 1700+ mile jaunt to Denver and back, a 6 day road trip with only loosely defined plans– mainly just to spend some time not glued to a laptop (ironically, I was […]
- 2004
- Beached Dog After today’s Ocotillo Online Learning Group meeting, I am hitting the road for a long weekend in San Diego. I need to romp in the ocean and find some good fish tacos. Much to Mrs CogDogBlog’s pleasure, I am likely leaving the laptop at home 😉 so this blog will be in holding pattern a […]
- 2003
- The Fuss About RSS wiki has moved The wiki for TheFuss has moved to a new, more nicely presented location (thanks to CSS and Brian!). TheFuss wiki is a growing resource about RSS, learning objects, etc that myself, Brian Lamb, and D’Arcy Norman presented July 11, 2003 for the LOVCOP teleconference (LOVCOP=Learning Objects Virtual Community of Practice). Share this barking on social […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 10 posts previously published on September 3rd
- 2017
- Hey Cousin Bobby, Hi from Strawberry, Arizona The reminder from Google Calendar is stark “Cousin Bobby Klugman Y (1984)” That comes from family births/deaths/anniversaries I pulled from my Mom’s calendar after she passed away. “Y” means “yahrzeit” for the candles Jewish people light on the date marking a death. I think Bobby was my Dad’s cousin, his mom Helen was my grandmother’s […] ➡
- 2014
- Don’t Blog Like My Brother https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS3GssVNdXw Should teaching/learning be this fun? Heck yeah. Yesterday, my blog brothers Jim “Click” Groom and Howard “Embed” Rheingold launched the first live session for Connected Courses and open connected course about teaching open connected courses (see recursion). The first two week segment we, the Connected Brothers, are running is the “Pre-course” meant to onboard […] ➡
- 2013
- Mickey Has Lost His Head! Oh that dog! This is my contribution for today’s ds106 Daily Create assignment Create your headless ds106 portrait. Mickey is my long gone (11 years) Labrador Retriever that became my logo everywhere, on the blog, on Twitter, even on my arm: That is headFULL not headLESS. So I went back to the original photo the […] ➡
- YouTube Breaks Tag Functionality. Internet Does Not Notice. Blog at 11. cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by maziar hooshmand I feel lonely on the internet… because I still hold on dearly tot he idea of tagging content as a means to organize across communities. It’s so 2002. At one time, people could tag videos on YouTube as a way to organize […] ➡
- 2011
- Blown Away By #Cookielove cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog One of my mom’s recently acquired phrases was her being “blown away” by something positive, and I am sure those would be her words at seeing what by internet friends are doing in her honor tomorrow. Thanks to Martha Burtis and Giulia Forsythe (I think […] ➡
- 2009
- A Place for Sharing Stories of Teachers/Heroes I routinely delete those emails (and rarely get to the bottom, the trash impulse comes quickly) that come in requesting me to blog about some software/web site/product… “This ain’t no request line, try WXYZ…” But one came this week that made my drop my routine (it’s got storytelling! web sharing!), because in the first sentence […] ➡
- WP to Twitter + HashTag (an idea in search of a use) I had this idea to explore and honestly could not find a relevant use to even flesh it out, so am putting it out there in case others do. There are several tools you can use to have your blogs, when they publish posts, to automatically send a tweet out with the link. On this […] ➡
- 2008
- Going Where I Have Been Going Where I Have Been by cogdogblog posted 3 Sep ’08, 12.36am MDT PST on flickr This is in the last hour of my 1700+ mile jaunt to Denver and back, a 6 day road trip with only loosely defined plans– mainly just to spend some time not glued to a laptop (ironically, I was […] ➡
- 2004
- Beached Dog After today’s Ocotillo Online Learning Group meeting, I am hitting the road for a long weekend in San Diego. I need to romp in the ocean and find some good fish tacos. Much to Mrs CogDogBlog’s pleasure, I am likely leaving the laptop at home 😉 so this blog will be in holding pattern a […] ➡
- 2003
- The Fuss About RSS wiki has moved The wiki for TheFuss has moved to a new, more nicely presented location (thanks to CSS and Brian!). TheFuss wiki is a growing resource about RSS, learning objects, etc that myself, Brian Lamb, and D’Arcy Norman presented July 11, 2003 for the LOVCOP teleconference (LOVCOP=Learning Objects Virtual Community of Practice). Share this barking on social […] ➡
// 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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