“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 May 20th
- 2015
- Me Playing Guitar With a UK Cellist at a Mission in Tucson That’s not only a confusing title it’s seemingly something unlikely had you asked me a year ago — “Will you in the future play guitar with a cello teacher you meet for the first time at a 200 year old mission in Tucson?” And today’s meeting with Laura Ritchie ought to have been an entry […]
- 2014
- Riding The [Frozen] Wave in Gimli Before there was a dwarf from Middle Earth (or least before he was penned to Lord of the Rings), Gimli, or “New Iceland” has been there by Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada. Thanks to some colleagues, I had a chance to spend some time there as an invited speaker for the Riding the Waves of […]
- 2012
- Plus 20 Lost in the shuffle of activity last week was a May 18 milestone; that day marked 20 years of my edtech career, the day I started my job as “programmer analyst/instructional systems” at the Maricopa Community Colleges. Wow was I green, but also a sponge. After my immersion of system culture at an Ocotillo retreat […]
- 2011
- Two Months On the Lam cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by woodleywonderworks It has been a little over two months since I left the building at the NMC, two months of not working, not getting a paycheck. How is it? If you’ve been around me lately, you know my new favorite theme song. If you are not […]
- May Story a Day #20: A Great Day Today was an epic road trip with Jim Groom- we hit Flagstaff, the tacky Flintstone Village at Valle, and then many of the viewpoints of the Grand Canyon out to the east exit, ending with an epic pile of Navajo tacos at Cameron Trading Post. This day was great, so f***ing great (f-word warning for […]
- Thru the Lens at Northern Voice I was excited to have my session on Looking Through the Lens accepted for Northern Voice 2011. I had done this one before, but infused a few more new bits for this audience. More or less, I used photographs to talk about what we can learn about learning from the act of photography: The mechanics […]
- 2010
- Why I’ll Never Be a Business Person Some colleagues out there are group reading the hip all the cool kids hot edu WTF book, Anya Kamenetz’s DIY U Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education . I’m game since a bunch of my buddies have mentions in there. However, in my Amazon shopping, I am stumped about the pricing of […]
- AR Stories (ya cant do this on a kindle or an ipad) This is the newest Dominoe story created in a tool so new and exciting I don’t have a category. I heard of Zooburst first in March 2010 at the NMC Symposium on New Media & Learning when Craig Kapp did one of the most outstanding presentations I’d seen anywhere, a session on the Augmented Reality […]
- 2009
- ________ing About Not ________ing cc licensed flickr photo shared by Chandra Marsono Despite Cole’s assertion I have never made a rule about “blogging about not blogging.” This was actually something I heard at a presentation last February at Northern Voice as more of an observation of how often we start a post by “I am sorry I have not […]
- Hanging Out in Payson with @hrheingold 2009/365/140 Hanging Out in Payson with @hrheingold by cogdogblog posted 20 May ’09, 10.43pm MDT PST on flickr You never know who will bump into at the Bee Line Cafe in Payson, Arizona. Nah, this was planned. Howard Rheingold was in Phoenix yesterday as a keynote speaker for the 2009 Maricopa Teaching and Learning with […]
- 2007
- Jaiku: Coming Soon on Betamax? My how the web 2.0 winds blow. It’s been about a week since my last blog post about twitter (sounds sort of like a confessional- “post 5 hail tweets and…”). Last week, right during the first day of Faculty Academy, twitter got really flaky. It would display tweets, but most tweets made just went into […]
- 2004
- Comparison Shopping for Blogware Are you tired of your current weblog software? Does MovableType’s new pricing make your blood boil? Sick of stomping spam? Hate your side bar? How much would you pay for a new weblog system? If you call before midnight tonight…. Well, there are not really midnight ads hawking blog software, but just in case you […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 12 posts previously published on May 20th
- 2015
- Me Playing Guitar With a UK Cellist at a Mission in Tucson That’s not only a confusing title it’s seemingly something unlikely had you asked me a year ago — “Will you in the future play guitar with a cello teacher you meet for the first time at a 200 year old mission in Tucson?” And today’s meeting with Laura Ritchie ought to have been an entry […] ➡
- 2014
- Riding The [Frozen] Wave in Gimli Before there was a dwarf from Middle Earth (or least before he was penned to Lord of the Rings), Gimli, or “New Iceland” has been there by Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada. Thanks to some colleagues, I had a chance to spend some time there as an invited speaker for the Riding the Waves of […] ➡
- 2012
- Plus 20 Lost in the shuffle of activity last week was a May 18 milestone; that day marked 20 years of my edtech career, the day I started my job as “programmer analyst/instructional systems” at the Maricopa Community Colleges. Wow was I green, but also a sponge. After my immersion of system culture at an Ocotillo retreat […] ➡
- 2011
- Two Months On the Lam cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by woodleywonderworks It has been a little over two months since I left the building at the NMC, two months of not working, not getting a paycheck. How is it? If you’ve been around me lately, you know my new favorite theme song. If you are not […] ➡
- May Story a Day #20: A Great Day Today was an epic road trip with Jim Groom- we hit Flagstaff, the tacky Flintstone Village at Valle, and then many of the viewpoints of the Grand Canyon out to the east exit, ending with an epic pile of Navajo tacos at Cameron Trading Post. This day was great, so f***ing great (f-word warning for […] ➡
- Thru the Lens at Northern Voice I was excited to have my session on Looking Through the Lens accepted for Northern Voice 2011. I had done this one before, but infused a few more new bits for this audience. More or less, I used photographs to talk about what we can learn about learning from the act of photography: The mechanics […] ➡
- 2010
- Why I’ll Never Be a Business Person Some colleagues out there are group reading the hip all the cool kids hot edu WTF book, Anya Kamenetz’s DIY U Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education . I’m game since a bunch of my buddies have mentions in there. However, in my Amazon shopping, I am stumped about the pricing of […] ➡
- AR Stories (ya cant do this on a kindle or an ipad) This is the newest Dominoe story created in a tool so new and exciting I don’t have a category. I heard of Zooburst first in March 2010 at the NMC Symposium on New Media & Learning when Craig Kapp did one of the most outstanding presentations I’d seen anywhere, a session on the Augmented Reality […] ➡
- 2009
- ________ing About Not ________ing cc licensed flickr photo shared by Chandra Marsono Despite Cole’s assertion I have never made a rule about “blogging about not blogging.” This was actually something I heard at a presentation last February at Northern Voice as more of an observation of how often we start a post by “I am sorry I have not […] ➡
- Hanging Out in Payson with @hrheingold 2009/365/140 Hanging Out in Payson with @hrheingold by cogdogblog posted 20 May ’09, 10.43pm MDT PST on flickr You never know who will bump into at the Bee Line Cafe in Payson, Arizona. Nah, this was planned. Howard Rheingold was in Phoenix yesterday as a keynote speaker for the 2009 Maricopa Teaching and Learning with […] ➡
- 2007
- Jaiku: Coming Soon on Betamax? My how the web 2.0 winds blow. It’s been about a week since my last blog post about twitter (sounds sort of like a confessional- “post 5 hail tweets and…”). Last week, right during the first day of Faculty Academy, twitter got really flaky. It would display tweets, but most tweets made just went into […] ➡
- 2004
- Comparison Shopping for Blogware Are you tired of your current weblog software? Does MovableType’s new pricing make your blood boil? Sick of stomping spam? Hate your side bar? How much would you pay for a new weblog system? If you call before midnight tonight…. Well, there are not really midnight ads hawking blog software, but just in case you […] ➡
// 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.
