“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 August 6th
- 2016
- Does The Web Come in My Own Size? Or Only Medium? Let me start this by saying very clearly that I have been sporadically publishing on medium.com for more than two years; there are some things I really like about the platform, a clean layout, ability to go big with photos, the in-content editing experience, in-content commenting. They took away one feature I liked, being able […]
- 2014
- Digitizing Spinning Shellac Among the memorabilia I brought back from my Mom’s house was my on set of teen age purchased vinyl LPs, but also about eighteen 78s that I had always remembered sitting on the shelves in our basement. Any flat disc record, made between about 1898 and the late 1950s and playing at a speed around […]
- 2012
- What You Will Be Saying August 27 That’s right. “They” will be here, keeping you up late at night in front of the blinking screen — rattling their animated chains, broadcasting ghostly noises, spooking you to do things daily, remixing your senses… August 27 marks the start of the two online sections of ds106 at University of Mary Washington. Will “you” be […]
- A Little Magic No one really reads this blog, I hope. I am testing this. Let’s say we need to add some documentation here for doing email…
- 2009
- The Day Twitter Died cc licensed flickr photo shared by .m for matthijs with apologies to Don McLean… Not so long, long ago… I can still remember How those tweets used to make me smile. And I knew if I had my chance That I could make those people retweet And, maybe, they’d be happy for a while. But […]
- 2008
- When the Google Cloud Shits on You Cloud computing is the looming buzz word. All these magical “apps in the cloud” sound exciting… until the cloud fizzles on you. In June, we switched our email service over to the Google Enterprise version for Education, and until this morning at 11:04am PDT I was a happy camper. My IMAP email connection was failing […]
- IMing Oneself Virtually Talking To Myself From an iPod to an Avatar in a Virtual World by cogdogblog posted 6 Aug ’08, 2.49pm MDT PST on flickr What does it mean if I am sending text messages from my iPhone to my second avatar in Second Life? It could mean some sort of techno-psychotic meltdown as my world […]
- 2005
- Wow! Vox Declicii Whew! The guys down in the power department apparently flicked the switch on for Maricopa’s internet connection, (though email is still pending, but who the spam pile?). Wow, almost 28 hours without blogging, I almost have the shakes 😉 While the blog was down, I came across the wildly dynamic Vox Delicii , Michal Migurski’s […]
- 2003
- MERLOT: Building Communities Through Collaboration (This blog is from memory- a browser freeze up managed to eat a half composed immediate blog entry). First half was on the connection of MERLOT and EDUCAUSE’s NLII (National Learning Infrastructure Initiative). NLII research fellows Colleen Carmean and Patricia McGee provided the overview of NLII as the arm of the EDUCAUSE organization that looks […]
- MERLOT: EdNA Online Waiting now for the start of Garry Putland’s talk on the Australian LO portal- I had a chance to chat with him early, and heard about what sounds like an incredible integration of information connected with RSS- he mentioned availablity of more than 2000 feeds, not only for objects, but information piped to different web […]
- The MLX Poster Lands at MERLOT It is here. It is not on a board or two dimensional or a tri-fold, and features real packages. The Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) poster session has appeared at the MERLOT conference (no thanks to UPS and customs goofups). It is all representational- a model train representing the “warehouse” metaphor, trucks representing the delivery of […]
- MERLOT Keynote: Leading from Both Ends Gerry Hanely, head MERLOT “wine steward”- said a theme was “connecting learning repositories”. Interesting, eh? Can you think of an acronym that fits there? It begins with an R…. Keynote: “Leading from Both Ends”- Doug MacLeod from Netcetera to talk about eduSourceCanada. Introduced “Donut Object Repositories” Tim Horton’s- a chain of thousands of franchises across […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 12 posts previously published on August 6th
- 2016
- Does The Web Come in My Own Size? Or Only Medium? Let me start this by saying very clearly that I have been sporadically publishing on medium.com for more than two years; there are some things I really like about the platform, a clean layout, ability to go big with photos, the in-content editing experience, in-content commenting. They took away one feature I liked, being able […] ➡
- 2014
- Digitizing Spinning Shellac Among the memorabilia I brought back from my Mom’s house was my on set of teen age purchased vinyl LPs, but also about eighteen 78s that I had always remembered sitting on the shelves in our basement. Any flat disc record, made between about 1898 and the late 1950s and playing at a speed around […] ➡
- 2012
- What You Will Be Saying August 27 That’s right. “They” will be here, keeping you up late at night in front of the blinking screen — rattling their animated chains, broadcasting ghostly noises, spooking you to do things daily, remixing your senses… August 27 marks the start of the two online sections of ds106 at University of Mary Washington. Will “you” be […] ➡
- A Little Magic No one really reads this blog, I hope. I am testing this. Let’s say we need to add some documentation here for doing email… ➡
- 2009
- The Day Twitter Died cc licensed flickr photo shared by .m for matthijs with apologies to Don McLean… Not so long, long ago… I can still remember How those tweets used to make me smile. And I knew if I had my chance That I could make those people retweet And, maybe, they’d be happy for a while. But […] ➡
- 2008
- When the Google Cloud Shits on You Cloud computing is the looming buzz word. All these magical “apps in the cloud” sound exciting… until the cloud fizzles on you. In June, we switched our email service over to the Google Enterprise version for Education, and until this morning at 11:04am PDT I was a happy camper. My IMAP email connection was failing […] ➡
- IMing Oneself Virtually Talking To Myself From an iPod to an Avatar in a Virtual World by cogdogblog posted 6 Aug ’08, 2.49pm MDT PST on flickr What does it mean if I am sending text messages from my iPhone to my second avatar in Second Life? It could mean some sort of techno-psychotic meltdown as my world […] ➡
- 2005
- Wow! Vox Declicii Whew! The guys down in the power department apparently flicked the switch on for Maricopa’s internet connection, (though email is still pending, but who the spam pile?). Wow, almost 28 hours without blogging, I almost have the shakes 😉 While the blog was down, I came across the wildly dynamic Vox Delicii , Michal Migurski’s […] ➡
- 2003
- MERLOT: Building Communities Through Collaboration (This blog is from memory- a browser freeze up managed to eat a half composed immediate blog entry). First half was on the connection of MERLOT and EDUCAUSE’s NLII (National Learning Infrastructure Initiative). NLII research fellows Colleen Carmean and Patricia McGee provided the overview of NLII as the arm of the EDUCAUSE organization that looks […] ➡
- MERLOT: EdNA Online Waiting now for the start of Garry Putland’s talk on the Australian LO portal- I had a chance to chat with him early, and heard about what sounds like an incredible integration of information connected with RSS- he mentioned availablity of more than 2000 feeds, not only for objects, but information piped to different web […] ➡
- The MLX Poster Lands at MERLOT It is here. It is not on a board or two dimensional or a tri-fold, and features real packages. The Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) poster session has appeared at the MERLOT conference (no thanks to UPS and customs goofups). It is all representational- a model train representing the “warehouse” metaphor, trucks representing the delivery of […] ➡
- MERLOT Keynote: Leading from Both Ends Gerry Hanely, head MERLOT “wine steward”- said a theme was “connecting learning repositories”. Interesting, eh? Can you think of an acronym that fits there? It begins with an R…. Keynote: “Leading from Both Ends”- Doug MacLeod from Netcetera to talk about eduSourceCanada. Introduced “Donut Object Repositories” Tim Horton’s- a chain of thousands of franchises across […] ➡
// 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.
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