“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 6 posts previously published on September 16th
- 2020
- Chasing Down Those Internet Misperceptions As those great O2 ads went… “Be More Dog” The other morning as Cori and I went outside, with Felix following, both of us humans saw the rabbit. Felix was oblivious as he scampered about. Even the rabbit was aware. But once Felix looked at the critter, he took off in chase. Full force. He […]
- 2016
- Discordant Choral Explainers (and a bonus YouTube tip) A few weeks ago I shared some results of fixing a leaky faucet by using a choral explanation approach (nods to Mike Caulfield) when one looks at how to videos in YouTube. In that time I also thought that we deal with this very often when looking at say products on Amazon or almost any […]
- 2015
- Maha A Little Help from Her Friends I blame Google Calendar. Yeah. Sometime last year (?) I started seeing on my GCal the birthdays of other people who I guess are in my G+ circles? Contacts? Who knows with Google/Alphabet/Whatevertheyarecalled now? Stuff just appears. Monday I spotted this in my calendar: Look at that, Thursday is Maha Bali’s birthday. Wow, it would […]
- #ITinkerLikeAhmed #IStandWithAhmed #IWontGetArrestedLikeAhmed Inventive kid Builds Electronic clock. Takes To School to Share. Administrators Panic. BOMB! Kid Handcuffed by Cops. Rage Breaks Out In Twitter (Facebook frets over button). Our collective cycle of social ignorance/stupidity/racism/ goes sadly through another Lather Rinse (Do Not Learn from Mistakes) cycle. I’m not going to summarize the story of Ahmed, it’s easy […]
- 2009
- Be a Curator with Flickr Galleries cc licensed flickr photo shared by WadeB Flickr was quietly introduced a new feature that will be interesting to use- Galleries. Think of it as a way to build collections of photos from other flickr users. It was always hard to do this before; the ost viable route was tagging photos, most people do not […]
- 2008
- Streets of Shanghai Fresh Delivery by cogdogblog posted 16 Sep ’08, 1.06pm MDT PST on flickr Old Town, Shanghai Hello from here, a long way from there. It’s the second morning here in Shanghai, and my mind is already reeling, less so from the travel and wear and tear from the sardine transport of United Airlines Economy class, […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 6 posts previously published on September 16th
- 2020
- Chasing Down Those Internet Misperceptions As those great O2 ads went… “Be More Dog” The other morning as Cori and I went outside, with Felix following, both of us humans saw the rabbit. Felix was oblivious as he scampered about. Even the rabbit was aware. But once Felix looked at the critter, he took off in chase. Full force. He […] ➡
- 2016
- Discordant Choral Explainers (and a bonus YouTube tip) A few weeks ago I shared some results of fixing a leaky faucet by using a choral explanation approach (nods to Mike Caulfield) when one looks at how to videos in YouTube. In that time I also thought that we deal with this very often when looking at say products on Amazon or almost any […] ➡
- 2015
- Maha A Little Help from Her Friends I blame Google Calendar. Yeah. Sometime last year (?) I started seeing on my GCal the birthdays of other people who I guess are in my G+ circles? Contacts? Who knows with Google/Alphabet/Whatevertheyarecalled now? Stuff just appears. Monday I spotted this in my calendar: Look at that, Thursday is Maha Bali’s birthday. Wow, it would […] ➡
- #ITinkerLikeAhmed #IStandWithAhmed #IWontGetArrestedLikeAhmed Inventive kid Builds Electronic clock. Takes To School to Share. Administrators Panic. BOMB! Kid Handcuffed by Cops. Rage Breaks Out In Twitter (Facebook frets over button). Our collective cycle of social ignorance/stupidity/racism/ goes sadly through another Lather Rinse (Do Not Learn from Mistakes) cycle. I’m not going to summarize the story of Ahmed, it’s easy […] ➡
- 2009
- Be a Curator with Flickr Galleries cc licensed flickr photo shared by WadeB Flickr was quietly introduced a new feature that will be interesting to use- Galleries. Think of it as a way to build collections of photos from other flickr users. It was always hard to do this before; the ost viable route was tagging photos, most people do not […] ➡
- 2008
- Streets of Shanghai Fresh Delivery by cogdogblog posted 16 Sep ’08, 1.06pm MDT PST on flickr Old Town, Shanghai Hello from here, a long way from there. It’s the second morning here in Shanghai, and my mind is already reeling, less so from the travel and wear and tear from the sardine transport of United Airlines Economy class, […] ➡
// 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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