“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 7 posts previously published on April 2nd
- 2019
- SPLOT says T-H-A-N-K-S Since this day of the week ends in “Y” that means it’s time to write another blog post about SPLOTs. No actually it’s the flip of the calendar month that triggered this post. April means it’s been a year since I was offered, out of the blue, a year long fellowship from Reclaim Hosting, to […]
- 2012
- Monday Teach In This week in ds106 I am asking my students to do a 5 minute overview of a technique or trick they learned in video editing by showing one of their video projects. I’m getting a lot out of it myself as the students teach and give each other feedback in class. Tonight’s demos included: Kierra’s […]
- Driving Groovy Continuing on a theme of tough cop genre, I made a movie mashup of Steve McQueen’s Bullitt mellowed out with the mellow sounds of Simon and Garfunkel’s 59th Street Bridge Song: Slow down, you move too fast. You got to make the morning last. Just kicking down the cobble stones. Looking for fun and feelin’ […]
- 2011
- There’s Capitalism and There’s Something Else… cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I was excited to get this copy of “Radio: an Illustrated Guide” from the folks at This American Life, the best-est radio show in the universe. I noticed it was a reading from one of the sections of ds106 and followed a link from there […]
- 2008
- And Now For Something Completely Different… DJ Lamb/Goldkey Mashes Up a Masterpiece In the future, many of you will claim they were there for today’s Confessions of a Mashup Un-Artist presentation by Brian Lamb. You will claim you were dancing on top of the school bus, poking your head in the tv sets, grooving to the wild audio remix he concocted. How often do you hear a […]
- Mashing Up Second Life into Connect Streaming Second Life into Connect by cogdogblog posted 2 Apr ’08, 9.28pm MDT PST on flickr For the NMC Symposium on Mashups we are also mashing up the venues for this online conference. Here we have a presentation by Jonathan Richter on the SaLamander Project that is taking place at the NMC Conference Center in […]
- 2006
- Showerhead Banner Blush. My flickr photo of the two headed shower at the Horton Plaza Westin (San Diego) is now the banner image at Starwoodlobby.com as part of their review of this hotel: Share this barking on social media
On Michael’s site he might use There are 7 posts previously published on April 2nd
- 2019
- SPLOT says T-H-A-N-K-S Since this day of the week ends in “Y” that means it’s time to write another blog post about SPLOTs. No actually it’s the flip of the calendar month that triggered this post. April means it’s been a year since I was offered, out of the blue, a year long fellowship from Reclaim Hosting, to […] ➡
- 2012
- Monday Teach In This week in ds106 I am asking my students to do a 5 minute overview of a technique or trick they learned in video editing by showing one of their video projects. I’m getting a lot out of it myself as the students teach and give each other feedback in class. Tonight’s demos included: Kierra’s […] ➡
- Driving Groovy Continuing on a theme of tough cop genre, I made a movie mashup of Steve McQueen’s Bullitt mellowed out with the mellow sounds of Simon and Garfunkel’s 59th Street Bridge Song: Slow down, you move too fast. You got to make the morning last. Just kicking down the cobble stones. Looking for fun and feelin’ […] ➡
- 2011
- There’s Capitalism and There’s Something Else… cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I was excited to get this copy of “Radio: an Illustrated Guide” from the folks at This American Life, the best-est radio show in the universe. I noticed it was a reading from one of the sections of ds106 and followed a link from there […] ➡
- 2008
- And Now For Something Completely Different… DJ Lamb/Goldkey Mashes Up a Masterpiece In the future, many of you will claim they were there for today’s Confessions of a Mashup Un-Artist presentation by Brian Lamb. You will claim you were dancing on top of the school bus, poking your head in the tv sets, grooving to the wild audio remix he concocted. How often do you hear a […] ➡
- Mashing Up Second Life into Connect Streaming Second Life into Connect by cogdogblog posted 2 Apr ’08, 9.28pm MDT PST on flickr For the NMC Symposium on Mashups we are also mashing up the venues for this online conference. Here we have a presentation by Jonathan Richter on the SaLamander Project that is taking place at the NMC Conference Center in […] ➡
- 2006
- Showerhead Banner Blush. My flickr photo of the two headed shower at the Horton Plaza Westin (San Diego) is now the banner image at Starwoodlobby.com as part of their review of this hotel: Share this barking on social media ➡
// 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.
