“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 12 posts previously published on February 20th
- 2019
- Metronome of Diabetic Life The period, in terms of the reciprocal of frequency, is 3 days. Every 3 days comes a beep from the box hanging on my belt. It actually looks like one of those antique pager devices. That’s the warning that the supply of insulin in my insulin pump is getting low, usually when there are less […]
- The Handy Person’s Guide to Manual SPLOT Updating You’re tooling along in your Model T SPLOT on the Internet Superhighway, and the tire goes flat, needing an update. Are you gonna wait for a tow truck, a helpful stranger to stop and help, or get out the jack to do it yourself? I’ve seen in most cases, that people who have gone through […]
- 2017
- Beautiful Benches and Attribution Abiding by the letter of open licenses mean you do not have to ask permission. But it sure is nice when someone goes beyond the letter of the license and lets you know of a use of your work. It’s an old story around here, and it’s so old I cannot find the source, but […]
- 2016
- CogDogBlog Now With Authentic Seals of Sarcasm I’ve noticed a few blogs I see in my RSS reader continually have something at the bottom of their posts like: This post ‘CogDogBlog Now With Authentic Seals of Sarcasm’ was originally published at CogDogBlog on February 20, 2016 My first thought was “duh” I am reading your blog, but have guessed people are doing […]
- 2015
- The Making of You Show Episode 5 Just when you thought where the You Show was headed (well we doubt you thought that, but it sounds good), something unexpected happens in Episode 5 The idea for this emerged from conversations Brian and had during the latter week … Continued
- It’s 2015. I’m Going to Make a HyperCard Stack. Why not? Because thanks to an open source emulator called “Sheep Shaver” and the various packages others created with it. I just launched a classic OS 9 environment on my 2014 MacBook Pro. I first installed oone version that included apps like Claris Works, but it lacked HyperCard. Then I found another one from James […]
- 2014
- Seed It Forward This summer I enjoyed the growth and harvesting of sunflower seeds, and special ones at that- they came from an internet friend in Canada! Today, I assembled all of the photos (a lot) into a video The story behind the story behind the story… Last year my gardening/soundmixing/edteching/doodling friend Jason in Vancouver shared the outputs […]
- 2012
- ds106 Foley Magic (cross posted from 106tricks.net just because I am so excited about tonight’s ds106 in class activity) This is the result of tonight’s in class ds106 challenge. As we are starting audio, I did a little explanation of the role of the foley artist in film and radio. Students formed 5 groups, and each group was […]
- 2005
- Keeping Tabs on Comments in Multiple Author Blogs (MovableType) With exceptions of newer systems (yes, Drupal fans, that is you), many blog software packages are designed from the perspective of single author weblogs, but with some digging you can expand their functionality for multi-author sites. We’ve recently released the Low Threshold Applications (LTA) site, recast as a blog from a once manually edited HTML […]
- Facets of del.icio.us = fac.etio.us Interesting- fac.etio.us is a rip, mix, and refeed of del.icio.us. Found by way of John the Blog (a.k.a David Weinberger), fac.etio.us is a product of Sideran Software (“navigation for the digital universe”), a maker of corporate tools that offer: …intelligent search and retrieval applications lead you easily through oceans of uncharted corporate data to the […]
- Linkroll Added to the Marklet Maker A commenter suggested I add Linkroll to the bookmarklet marklet maker collection, and that was an easy one to roll into the tool, which puts it up to a choice of 8 different web site submission tools that can be addressed with a click on a bookmark link. Linkroll is another “social bookmarks” site, though […]
- MLX Track Spam: The Annihilator It’s been a while since the spam roaches attached the Trackbacks on the Maricopa Learning eXchange, but I guess they had some extra time after recess to splat their PPC (porn, pills, casino) links into the MLX Sharebacks. I am still resisting closing it down completely, but likely will, as no one really sends non-spam […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 12 posts previously published on February 20th
- 2019
- Metronome of Diabetic Life The period, in terms of the reciprocal of frequency, is 3 days. Every 3 days comes a beep from the box hanging on my belt. It actually looks like one of those antique pager devices. That’s the warning that the supply of insulin in my insulin pump is getting low, usually when there are less […] ➡
- The Handy Person’s Guide to Manual SPLOT Updating You’re tooling along in your Model T SPLOT on the Internet Superhighway, and the tire goes flat, needing an update. Are you gonna wait for a tow truck, a helpful stranger to stop and help, or get out the jack to do it yourself? I’ve seen in most cases, that people who have gone through […] ➡
- 2017
- Beautiful Benches and Attribution Abiding by the letter of open licenses mean you do not have to ask permission. But it sure is nice when someone goes beyond the letter of the license and lets you know of a use of your work. It’s an old story around here, and it’s so old I cannot find the source, but […] ➡
- 2016
- CogDogBlog Now With Authentic Seals of Sarcasm I’ve noticed a few blogs I see in my RSS reader continually have something at the bottom of their posts like: This post ‘CogDogBlog Now With Authentic Seals of Sarcasm’ was originally published at CogDogBlog on February 20, 2016 My first thought was “duh” I am reading your blog, but have guessed people are doing […] ➡
- 2015
- The Making of You Show Episode 5 Just when you thought where the You Show was headed (well we doubt you thought that, but it sounds good), something unexpected happens in Episode 5 The idea for this emerged from conversations Brian and had during the latter week … Continued ➡
- It’s 2015. I’m Going to Make a HyperCard Stack. Why not? Because thanks to an open source emulator called “Sheep Shaver” and the various packages others created with it. I just launched a classic OS 9 environment on my 2014 MacBook Pro. I first installed oone version that included apps like Claris Works, but it lacked HyperCard. Then I found another one from James […] ➡
- 2014
- Seed It Forward This summer I enjoyed the growth and harvesting of sunflower seeds, and special ones at that- they came from an internet friend in Canada! Today, I assembled all of the photos (a lot) into a video The story behind the story behind the story… Last year my gardening/soundmixing/edteching/doodling friend Jason in Vancouver shared the outputs […] ➡
- 2012
- ds106 Foley Magic (cross posted from 106tricks.net just because I am so excited about tonight’s ds106 in class activity) This is the result of tonight’s in class ds106 challenge. As we are starting audio, I did a little explanation of the role of the foley artist in film and radio. Students formed 5 groups, and each group was […] ➡
- 2005
- Keeping Tabs on Comments in Multiple Author Blogs (MovableType) With exceptions of newer systems (yes, Drupal fans, that is you), many blog software packages are designed from the perspective of single author weblogs, but with some digging you can expand their functionality for multi-author sites. We’ve recently released the Low Threshold Applications (LTA) site, recast as a blog from a once manually edited HTML […] ➡
- Facets of del.icio.us = fac.etio.us Interesting- fac.etio.us is a rip, mix, and refeed of del.icio.us. Found by way of John the Blog (a.k.a David Weinberger), fac.etio.us is a product of Sideran Software (“navigation for the digital universe”), a maker of corporate tools that offer: …intelligent search and retrieval applications lead you easily through oceans of uncharted corporate data to the […] ➡
- Linkroll Added to the Marklet Maker A commenter suggested I add Linkroll to the bookmarklet marklet maker collection, and that was an easy one to roll into the tool, which puts it up to a choice of 8 different web site submission tools that can be addressed with a click on a bookmark link. Linkroll is another “social bookmarks” site, though […] ➡
- MLX Track Spam: The Annihilator It’s been a while since the spam roaches attached the Trackbacks on the Maricopa Learning eXchange, but I guess they had some extra time after recess to splat their PPC (porn, pills, casino) links into the MLX Sharebacks. I am still resisting closing it down completely, but likely will, as no one really sends non-spam […] ➡
// 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.
