“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 18 posts previously published on December 10th
- 2022
- Popping the Clutch on SPLOT WordPress Documentation I sit down planning to write some straight forward documentation, and somehow a stick shift manual transmission metaphor slides in and I am photoshopping SPLOT logos on old book covers. Welcome to my easily distracted mind. Before I go too far off the blog post map, I am covering here: Let’s shift this post into […]
- 2021
- 2014
- What if I had no featured image? Perhaps a philosophical question? Nah. Just testing default featured image option for the Quick Featured Images plugin. This post has no featured image, nor any images at all in it (a rare thing). Ignore the laboratory spills. Share this barking on social media
- Those Who Travel the Open Web Federation With Audio Cloaking Devices The web is founded on both a philosophy and a technology the requires travels on the web to be open as in… viewable. Any device we use to see web content is able to construct that view because anyone, any device, any machine can see the underlying information. It’s the beauty of the browser menu […]
- 2013
- Lunch, Stories, Song, and Rhubarb Pie with Buckshot Dot cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Do you remember where not getting a seat in musical chairs crowned you a loser? It does not always play out that way. A few weeks ago I attended an annual event in Pine, Arizona that I try to attend every year I […]
- 2012
- Openness Beyond the Course Container cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by 2493â„¢ With no sign of any waning of MOOC Hysteria, it seems like a “course” is of course the only way of convening educators online. There is some stampeded going to create more MOOCs or various anagram soups of MOONs OOs, MOOS, whatever. Alec Couros […]
- Thank the Unicorns that Keep ds106 Humming Last night we had an unfortunate outage at umwdomains, the hosting for ds106 students at the University of Mary Washington. With this being finals week, students working feverishly to finish projects and reflections, twitter was never so lit up with activity. Let’s give some appreciation to people like Tim Owens who was working on this […]
- Mini MOOCs Found among the coffee additives at HB’s, a restaurant in Pine, AZ, this little product that was created for the ds106 Re-brand ’em Assignment: The logo is an important part of a company. For this assignment, you are to choose a company and re-brand them. Take their logo and remix it, or start from scratch […]
- 2011
- Jim’s Grooming Spotted this truck on the streets of Hobart- you always need to know where you can call for some good grooming: In honor of Tom Woodward’s deft outlining of the 4 pillars of ds106 Share this barking on social media
- 2007
- What The Web Shows web shows what we have chosen to care about posted 9 Dec ’07, 2.26pm MST PST on flickr I’ve always been fascinated by efforts to map cyberspace”¦ most maps seem to focus on the physical network connections but the ones I find the most interesting are those that try to map the diversity and connections […]
- Like I Need an Excuse be Twittering- now to climb the Tweeterboard Of course I find the coolest of new stuff in my twitter stream, like from Dean Shareski just know came a link to Tweeterboard- a site that provides analytics on tweeters, their activity, what they are linking to, etc. Tweeterboard is a way of looking at who is influential on Twitter based on their conversations […]
- 2005
- She Was Out Sick the Day They Handed Out Common Sense It’s wonderful when real people can utter statements that go beyond what someone’s imagination can conjure up. I live in Scottsdale, Arizona, a city known for its luxury resorts, endless seas of golf courses, ritzy art galleries, giant mansions (who truly requires 15,000 square feet of living space), monster SUVs, etc. The money increases as […]
- 2004
- Trackback / Sharebacks: Give These Packages Some Lovin’ We’ve promoted many different times (see the Breezed NMC Oct 2003 presentation) the notion that weblog Trackback technology provides a simple, and working now, method to connect descriptions of usage of learning objects stored in “thingamotories” (or “repositories if you like). Or, as we deemed it Learning Object Reuse Acknowledgment (LORA). Yet. while well received, […]
- Housecleaning the Blogroll There was dust and some missing pieces to my sidebar list of blogs I read regularly– which I spit out from Bloglines using their JavaScript insert to list on the sidebar of CDB. A number of old favorites have gone quiet, and sorry, but have slipped off my radar, quite a few I added, especially […]
- 2003
- Back to Promoting MLX It is time to crank up the promotion department for the Maricopa Learing eXchange (MLX), given that the semester is winding down. We have set up a new PR area that links all of the MLX presentation and news tidbits. With the exception of a nice burst of 15 entries from Estrella Mountain Community College […]
- Kung-Log: Neo Says “Whoah” Ok. I am trying some way out there, It is a Mac OSX app called Kung-Log that allows me (I think) to post and edit my MovableType blog directly from a friendly Mac OSX interface. We will see what happens as I am “Kung-Log” blogging this one right now. Woah. Share this barking on social […]
- X Getting
Closer Still working on the new server (see X Marks the (Jade) Spot). I am stumped why a new Apple XServer delivered in November came with OSX Server 10.2.8 pre-intalled though the current 10.3 disks were there. I had trouble getting the 10.3 CDs recognized so blew ahead with the older OS. That was silly. Share […] - PhotoBlogging with Buzznet I have a pent for photography. It was the last elective I took as an undergrad, and if it were earlier, I would have taken a different career path. Blogging is great, but there are some neat niches for other flavors. Take “photo blog”. I recently stumbled along via legendary web designer Jeffrey Veen this […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 18 posts previously published on December 10th
- 2022
- Popping the Clutch on SPLOT WordPress Documentation I sit down planning to write some straight forward documentation, and somehow a stick shift manual transmission metaphor slides in and I am photoshopping SPLOT logos on old book covers. Welcome to my easily distracted mind. Before I go too far off the blog post map, I am covering here: Let’s shift this post into […] ➡
- 2021
- 2014
- What if I had no featured image? Perhaps a philosophical question? Nah. Just testing default featured image option for the Quick Featured Images plugin. This post has no featured image, nor any images at all in it (a rare thing). Ignore the laboratory spills. Share this barking on social media ➡
- Those Who Travel the Open Web Federation With Audio Cloaking Devices The web is founded on both a philosophy and a technology the requires travels on the web to be open as in… viewable. Any device we use to see web content is able to construct that view because anyone, any device, any machine can see the underlying information. It’s the beauty of the browser menu […] ➡
- 2013
- Lunch, Stories, Song, and Rhubarb Pie with Buckshot Dot cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Do you remember where not getting a seat in musical chairs crowned you a loser? It does not always play out that way. A few weeks ago I attended an annual event in Pine, Arizona that I try to attend every year I […] ➡
- 2012
- Openness Beyond the Course Container cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by 2493â„¢ With no sign of any waning of MOOC Hysteria, it seems like a “course” is of course the only way of convening educators online. There is some stampeded going to create more MOOCs or various anagram soups of MOONs OOs, MOOS, whatever. Alec Couros […] ➡
- Thank the Unicorns that Keep ds106 Humming Last night we had an unfortunate outage at umwdomains, the hosting for ds106 students at the University of Mary Washington. With this being finals week, students working feverishly to finish projects and reflections, twitter was never so lit up with activity. Let’s give some appreciation to people like Tim Owens who was working on this […] ➡
- Mini MOOCs Found among the coffee additives at HB’s, a restaurant in Pine, AZ, this little product that was created for the ds106 Re-brand ’em Assignment: The logo is an important part of a company. For this assignment, you are to choose a company and re-brand them. Take their logo and remix it, or start from scratch […] ➡
- 2011
- Jim’s Grooming Spotted this truck on the streets of Hobart- you always need to know where you can call for some good grooming: In honor of Tom Woodward’s deft outlining of the 4 pillars of ds106 Share this barking on social media ➡
- 2007
- What The Web Shows web shows what we have chosen to care about posted 9 Dec ’07, 2.26pm MST PST on flickr I’ve always been fascinated by efforts to map cyberspace”¦ most maps seem to focus on the physical network connections but the ones I find the most interesting are those that try to map the diversity and connections […] ➡
- Like I Need an Excuse be Twittering- now to climb the Tweeterboard Of course I find the coolest of new stuff in my twitter stream, like from Dean Shareski just know came a link to Tweeterboard- a site that provides analytics on tweeters, their activity, what they are linking to, etc. Tweeterboard is a way of looking at who is influential on Twitter based on their conversations […] ➡
- 2005
- She Was Out Sick the Day They Handed Out Common Sense It’s wonderful when real people can utter statements that go beyond what someone’s imagination can conjure up. I live in Scottsdale, Arizona, a city known for its luxury resorts, endless seas of golf courses, ritzy art galleries, giant mansions (who truly requires 15,000 square feet of living space), monster SUVs, etc. The money increases as […] ➡
- 2004
- Trackback / Sharebacks: Give These Packages Some Lovin’ We’ve promoted many different times (see the Breezed NMC Oct 2003 presentation) the notion that weblog Trackback technology provides a simple, and working now, method to connect descriptions of usage of learning objects stored in “thingamotories” (or “repositories if you like). Or, as we deemed it Learning Object Reuse Acknowledgment (LORA). Yet. while well received, […] ➡
- Housecleaning the Blogroll There was dust and some missing pieces to my sidebar list of blogs I read regularly– which I spit out from Bloglines using their JavaScript insert to list on the sidebar of CDB. A number of old favorites have gone quiet, and sorry, but have slipped off my radar, quite a few I added, especially […] ➡
- 2003
- Back to Promoting MLX It is time to crank up the promotion department for the Maricopa Learing eXchange (MLX), given that the semester is winding down. We have set up a new PR area that links all of the MLX presentation and news tidbits. With the exception of a nice burst of 15 entries from Estrella Mountain Community College […] ➡
- Kung-Log: Neo Says “Whoah” Ok. I am trying some way out there, It is a Mac OSX app called Kung-Log that allows me (I think) to post and edit my MovableType blog directly from a friendly Mac OSX interface. We will see what happens as I am “Kung-Log” blogging this one right now. Woah. Share this barking on social […] ➡
- X Getting
Closer Still working on the new server (see X Marks the (Jade) Spot). I am stumped why a new Apple XServer delivered in November came with OSX Server 10.2.8 pre-intalled though the current 10.3 disks were there. I had trouble getting the 10.3 CDs recognized so blew ahead with the older OS. That was silly. Share […] ➡ - PhotoBlogging with Buzznet I have a pent for photography. It was the last elective I took as an undergrad, and if it were earlier, I would have taken a different career path. Blogging is great, but there are some neat niches for other flavors. Take “photo blog”. I recently stumbled along via legendary web designer Jeffrey Veen this […] ➡
// 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.
