“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 16 posts previously published on December 30th
- 2021
- Claiming and Reclaiming a 15 Year Old PB Wiki Ah the work of reclaiming is ongoing. I’ve not tended to much in 2021 to my pile of web bones, where I list my efforts to reclaim my external web sites that have been dumped by the hosts. In yesterday’s email, I got a notice from PBWorks that one of my old wikis was in […]
- 2018
- Is Will in the Right Place? “Will”, someone I don’t know, spends his finite time on this planet emailing strangers asking the not so philosophical question, “Am I In the Right Place?” Hi Alan, Will here again following up on a recent email I sent about contributing a WordPress security graphic to Cog Dog Blog. On the chance that my message fell […]
- 2017
- The Internet is Shit. But is it evenly distributed? There’s a lot of dark writing about the state of the internet. Those links are just by people I know. Through the internet. And then there is this guy, who I don’t know, who is offering, and suggesting the folks who were around when the Wizards Stayed Up Late, should all in unison declare “We […]
- 2016
- It’s Lonely Fighting for Photo Attribution One more bang on my Always Be Attributing drum. I am going to try to make a case that if you “just follow the rules” for openly licensed images CC0 / public domain images interpreted as “I don’t have to attribute”, you are more or less advocating for grab and go regardless of license. And […]
- 2012
- Not Quite Norma GIF How could anyone resist doing Tom Woodward’s Not Quite Norma Jean assignment? The past is strange. Remake this classic Marilyn Monroe “expressions sheet” with self-portraits or with the aid of a friend. Bonus points for the involvement of a stranger. And I thought, if Tom Woodward can pose coyly like Marilyn, than surely my stuffed […]
- 2011
- Write the Script: My Dinner with Toska Here is yet another new ds106 assignment. There are not quite as many for the writing type, so I wanted to add to the bucket. This builds off of the Photo Translation one (I am stoked to see folks playing with it right off the bat) and uses the Words with No Translation tool. I […]
- 365 Photos. Click. Advance. Do it Again. Tomorrow is the 365th day of the year. If I was a perfectionist, I’d be distraught over having missed 15 days out of my 2011/365 photos. Nah. I spent a few nights going back and picking ones I had posted and had forgotten to add to my set. I fixed a few that were mis-numbered, […]
- More Dog Songs Courtesy of my sailing sister, comes a new song for my next round of Dog Songs on ds106 radio, this is “Let the Big Dog Eat” The performer is Bill Wharton, who is new to me, a Florida blues dude also known as the Sauce Boss, and apparently works both the guitar and the kitchen […]
- Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go On the Internet… cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog There are monsters out there, zombies, vampires, aliens, amrching your way, dargginth eir limbs, dribbling their gob, hoisting their sharp implements… What will you do when ds106 knocks at your door? will you just mutter “It’s only a MOOC, it’s only a MOOC…” “You’ll wish […]
- 2010
- Google Mapping a Flickr Photo Set I’m cooking up a presentation for February I am calling (Not So Stupid) Browser Tricks – a ittle nod to Letterman’s shtick with pets. The premise is to show 10, maybe 12 things you can do with common web tools (or ones less well known) that do something, that, when you show someone else, would […]
- Ebert Schools Us in Reading Movies In doing some prep for a future presentation (this is almost historic in my modus operendi of procastination, as it is almost 2 months away from now), I revisited a seminal 2008 Roger Ebert post on How to Read a Movie. He shares a number of ideas I am thinking might have potential for ds106, […]
- 2007
- Hoosgot… Lazyweb 2.0? Cool Concept! Wish I had the productivity of Dave Sifry; in his announcement, in 48 hours he rolled out a nifty new twitter/blog crawl mashup called Hoosgot (aka “Who’s Got?”): a simple way to ask who’s got what you’re looking for. Just put “hoosgot” in a blog post or a Twitter tweet and it’ll show up here […]
- Four out of Five Social Networks Surveyed Said… Something that always gets my fur up is the blatant use of fishy language dressed up like “fact” or science. Last week when i was so idly bored (by choice) I was watching late night TV, and there were two different ads for things like “Gut Buster” or “Pilates Plus” – those ones where people […]
- Who’s Who in TwitDir It took twitter quite some time to add a search bar so you can find fellow tweeters, so its no surprise that TwitDir arose as an outside tool serving as a Twitter Directory, claiming to allow you to search among 715,235 twitterers. And since this the season of contagious listmaking, TwitDir offers the answers to […]
- 2004
- Flickr: The Land of 10,000 Memes Pontification on the meteoric popularity of Flickr is a common past time– and it makes all the sense in the world of network hubs, preferential attachment, link fitness, etc (see Thinking About Links…). Flickr was hardly the first photoblog site (I danced a bit with fotolog and buzznet before flickr even hit the seen) but […]
- Feed2JS Updates: Has Its Own Feed (published via MT) Thanks to some good feedback from suers, I’ve been able to make some needed corrections to our Feed2JS (RSS Feeds rendered via JavaScript). Like a Homer Simpson Doh! slap across the forehead, I realized that while I was faithfully adding to the main page’s history, it certainly could use an RSS Feed to publish news […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 16 posts previously published on December 30th
- 2021
- Claiming and Reclaiming a 15 Year Old PB Wiki Ah the work of reclaiming is ongoing. I’ve not tended to much in 2021 to my pile of web bones, where I list my efforts to reclaim my external web sites that have been dumped by the hosts. In yesterday’s email, I got a notice from PBWorks that one of my old wikis was in […] ➡
- 2018
- Is Will in the Right Place? “Will”, someone I don’t know, spends his finite time on this planet emailing strangers asking the not so philosophical question, “Am I In the Right Place?” Hi Alan, Will here again following up on a recent email I sent about contributing a WordPress security graphic to Cog Dog Blog. On the chance that my message fell […] ➡
- 2017
- The Internet is Shit. But is it evenly distributed? There’s a lot of dark writing about the state of the internet. Those links are just by people I know. Through the internet. And then there is this guy, who I don’t know, who is offering, and suggesting the folks who were around when the Wizards Stayed Up Late, should all in unison declare “We […] ➡
- 2016
- It’s Lonely Fighting for Photo Attribution One more bang on my Always Be Attributing drum. I am going to try to make a case that if you “just follow the rules” for openly licensed images CC0 / public domain images interpreted as “I don’t have to attribute”, you are more or less advocating for grab and go regardless of license. And […] ➡
- 2012
- Not Quite Norma GIF How could anyone resist doing Tom Woodward’s Not Quite Norma Jean assignment? The past is strange. Remake this classic Marilyn Monroe “expressions sheet” with self-portraits or with the aid of a friend. Bonus points for the involvement of a stranger. And I thought, if Tom Woodward can pose coyly like Marilyn, than surely my stuffed […] ➡
- 2011
- Write the Script: My Dinner with Toska Here is yet another new ds106 assignment. There are not quite as many for the writing type, so I wanted to add to the bucket. This builds off of the Photo Translation one (I am stoked to see folks playing with it right off the bat) and uses the Words with No Translation tool. I […] ➡
- 365 Photos. Click. Advance. Do it Again. Tomorrow is the 365th day of the year. If I was a perfectionist, I’d be distraught over having missed 15 days out of my 2011/365 photos. Nah. I spent a few nights going back and picking ones I had posted and had forgotten to add to my set. I fixed a few that were mis-numbered, […] ➡
- More Dog Songs Courtesy of my sailing sister, comes a new song for my next round of Dog Songs on ds106 radio, this is “Let the Big Dog Eat” The performer is Bill Wharton, who is new to me, a Florida blues dude also known as the Sauce Boss, and apparently works both the guitar and the kitchen […] ➡
- Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go On the Internet… cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog There are monsters out there, zombies, vampires, aliens, amrching your way, dargginth eir limbs, dribbling their gob, hoisting their sharp implements… What will you do when ds106 knocks at your door? will you just mutter “It’s only a MOOC, it’s only a MOOC…” “You’ll wish […] ➡
- 2010
- Google Mapping a Flickr Photo Set I’m cooking up a presentation for February I am calling (Not So Stupid) Browser Tricks – a ittle nod to Letterman’s shtick with pets. The premise is to show 10, maybe 12 things you can do with common web tools (or ones less well known) that do something, that, when you show someone else, would […] ➡
- Ebert Schools Us in Reading Movies In doing some prep for a future presentation (this is almost historic in my modus operendi of procastination, as it is almost 2 months away from now), I revisited a seminal 2008 Roger Ebert post on How to Read a Movie. He shares a number of ideas I am thinking might have potential for ds106, […] ➡
- 2007
- Hoosgot… Lazyweb 2.0? Cool Concept! Wish I had the productivity of Dave Sifry; in his announcement, in 48 hours he rolled out a nifty new twitter/blog crawl mashup called Hoosgot (aka “Who’s Got?”): a simple way to ask who’s got what you’re looking for. Just put “hoosgot” in a blog post or a Twitter tweet and it’ll show up here […] ➡
- Four out of Five Social Networks Surveyed Said… Something that always gets my fur up is the blatant use of fishy language dressed up like “fact” or science. Last week when i was so idly bored (by choice) I was watching late night TV, and there were two different ads for things like “Gut Buster” or “Pilates Plus” – those ones where people […] ➡
- Who’s Who in TwitDir It took twitter quite some time to add a search bar so you can find fellow tweeters, so its no surprise that TwitDir arose as an outside tool serving as a Twitter Directory, claiming to allow you to search among 715,235 twitterers. And since this the season of contagious listmaking, TwitDir offers the answers to […] ➡
- 2004
- Flickr: The Land of 10,000 Memes Pontification on the meteoric popularity of Flickr is a common past time– and it makes all the sense in the world of network hubs, preferential attachment, link fitness, etc (see Thinking About Links…). Flickr was hardly the first photoblog site (I danced a bit with fotolog and buzznet before flickr even hit the seen) but […] ➡
- Feed2JS Updates: Has Its Own Feed (published via MT) Thanks to some good feedback from suers, I’ve been able to make some needed corrections to our Feed2JS (RSS Feeds rendered via JavaScript). Like a Homer Simpson Doh! slap across the forehead, I realized that while I was faithfully adding to the main page’s history, it certainly could use an RSS Feed to publish news […] ➡
// 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.
