“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 9 posts previously published on April 7th
- 2023
- Hey, Felix, it’s Gotchya Day Number 7 Thanks to Pat Lockley from who I learned the phrase Gotchya Day, this week I knew to mark April 6 as the day in 2016 that I adopted Felix from the Payson, Arizona Humane Society. I had the original photo taken for me by a staff member as I left the facility my “new” dog. […]
- 2018
- Felix + 2 Friday marked the 2nd year since I adopted Felix, and since he turns four in May, that means now almost half of his life has been with me. On Monday I will take him for a hello visit to where I found him, the Humane Society of Central Arizona. And following the lead of Pat […]
- 2014
- Man That Bava Dog Can Blog! Given a photo from @drgarcia of Jim Groom and his new sidekick, Daphne, I was struck by how similar their intent was on the computer screen. As a fitting parallel for one of my older efforts at the ds106 assignment, the parent child head swap, we have now a dog who, if she tries hard, […]
- And… Does Research Prove We Process Video Information 1.8M times Faster Than Text? If you buy lock, stock, and “no need for pesky things like actual data” fact that we process visual information 60,000 times faster than text, there is nothing to stop one from taking video at 30 frames a second as information we can process 1,800,000 times faster than text. The Huffington Post College edition comes […]
- 2012
- Book Review: Teachers of Mad Dog Swamp I’ve been carting around this novel since randomly plucking it from the shelves last December, found at a used book shop in Hobart, Tasmania. The story by Khammaan Khonkhai is set in Thailand, and for me, the draw was its setting in a culture I knew little about. Piya, a newly trained teacher from the […]
- 2011
- Amping Your Google Forms to be Tweetable cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Ronan_C My list of words never used here include things like “monetize” or “viral” (oops I just used them). But in terms of trying to get a message out, I am keen to experiment with ways to make it go further. Yesterday, in one […]
- 2006
- Stepping In My Own Poop Sometimes, or maybe frequently, a post here is done rather rashly, impulsively, and often stupidly wrong. I step in my own dog poop. There’s nice places on the net where nice people say only nice things. Not here. Hopefully reader glean my “style” as my way of trying to provoke discussion, controversy, and get a […]
- 2005
- New Feed2JS Mirror and Some India Students Feed Aggregating More on the feed front. Sam at KinScape has offered and become the newest of the Feed2JS public mirror sites: http://www.kinscape.com/feed2js/ serving up feeds to JavaScript from a server in Michigan. Again, it was about a 30 minute install via ftp (mostly me finding my own typos and errors). We’re ready for more takers, let’s […]
- My Dentist Really Does NOT have RSS (but digital technology…) I whimsically, and falsely, wrote My Dentist Has an RSS Feed (there was a point, but that post has scrolled away…). However, he is rather wired for his work. Today, at his new office, they used a digital xray machine that takes the photos of your teeth, but they insert a mini sensor card in […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 9 posts previously published on April 7th
- 2023
- Hey, Felix, it’s Gotchya Day Number 7 Thanks to Pat Lockley from who I learned the phrase Gotchya Day, this week I knew to mark April 6 as the day in 2016 that I adopted Felix from the Payson, Arizona Humane Society. I had the original photo taken for me by a staff member as I left the facility my “new” dog. […] ➡
- 2018
- Felix + 2 Friday marked the 2nd year since I adopted Felix, and since he turns four in May, that means now almost half of his life has been with me. On Monday I will take him for a hello visit to where I found him, the Humane Society of Central Arizona. And following the lead of Pat […] ➡
- 2014
- Man That Bava Dog Can Blog! Given a photo from @drgarcia of Jim Groom and his new sidekick, Daphne, I was struck by how similar their intent was on the computer screen. As a fitting parallel for one of my older efforts at the ds106 assignment, the parent child head swap, we have now a dog who, if she tries hard, […] ➡
- And… Does Research Prove We Process Video Information 1.8M times Faster Than Text? If you buy lock, stock, and “no need for pesky things like actual data” fact that we process visual information 60,000 times faster than text, there is nothing to stop one from taking video at 30 frames a second as information we can process 1,800,000 times faster than text. The Huffington Post College edition comes […] ➡
- 2012
- Book Review: Teachers of Mad Dog Swamp I’ve been carting around this novel since randomly plucking it from the shelves last December, found at a used book shop in Hobart, Tasmania. The story by Khammaan Khonkhai is set in Thailand, and for me, the draw was its setting in a culture I knew little about. Piya, a newly trained teacher from the […] ➡
- 2011
- Amping Your Google Forms to be Tweetable cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Ronan_C My list of words never used here include things like “monetize” or “viral” (oops I just used them). But in terms of trying to get a message out, I am keen to experiment with ways to make it go further. Yesterday, in one […] ➡
- 2006
- Stepping In My Own Poop Sometimes, or maybe frequently, a post here is done rather rashly, impulsively, and often stupidly wrong. I step in my own dog poop. There’s nice places on the net where nice people say only nice things. Not here. Hopefully reader glean my “style” as my way of trying to provoke discussion, controversy, and get a […] ➡
- 2005
- New Feed2JS Mirror and Some India Students Feed Aggregating More on the feed front. Sam at KinScape has offered and become the newest of the Feed2JS public mirror sites: http://www.kinscape.com/feed2js/ serving up feeds to JavaScript from a server in Michigan. Again, it was about a 30 minute install via ftp (mostly me finding my own typos and errors). We’re ready for more takers, let’s […] ➡
- My Dentist Really Does NOT have RSS (but digital technology…) I whimsically, and falsely, wrote My Dentist Has an RSS Feed (there was a point, but that post has scrolled away…). However, he is rather wired for his work. Today, at his new office, they used a digital xray machine that takes the photos of your teeth, but they insert a mini sensor card in […] ➡
// 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.
