“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 December 24th
- 2022
- Convergence/Divergence It’s six o’clock PM, the outside solar lighting (aka the sun) has turned off, the temperature outside has warmed up from *&#^ing cold (where Fahrenheit and Celsius converge), we are cozy inside with warm drinks, silly movies, and completely unplugged, diverged from the w-o-r-k stuff. And this Christmas eve converges with the seventh night of […]
- 2017
- Chopping Ancestors from WordPress oEmbedded Tweets When I embed a tweet in my post, that’s all I want. But WordPress, and the Twitter API, wants to give me more. I don’t have to accept that. What am I blabbering about now? Well in a recent post where I am talking about using WordPress to publish your own versions of the soon […]
- 2016
- Year of the D-O-G Dear ___________, I had grand(iose) intentions of sending you a traditional holiday card. I sent out 12 of them, but sadly, your name was farther down the list in my contacts, and I ran out of stamps. I also ran out of non-pithy variations of what I could write above/below the pith salutations in store-bought […]
- 2014
- The New JIME Is Here! Navin R. CogDog: The new JIME’s here! The new JIME’s here! Harry Groom: Boy, I wish I could get that excited about nothing. Navin R. CogDog: Nothing? Are you kidding? Page 106 – Levine, Alan H.! I’m somebody now! Millions of people look at this paper everyday! This is the kind of education publicity – […]
- 2012
- I GIFly GIFfed a GIFfy 2012 GIF! Sure, the Oxford American Dictionary made the verb “to GIF” a word of the year, but they fell short– it should be noun, adjective, adverb, maybe even present past participle of the year, too. Yes, it’s the peak of ds106 GIFfest. And I did not even get close to sending out real holiday cards this […]
- 2010
- I’ll Take All of the Holidays for 500, Alec I’m ambiholidayous– I’ll celebrate anything. While growing up in a Jewish home in Baltimore, we had Hannukah this time of year. At the same time, one of my Dad’s favorite activities was taking me for a walk in the neighborhood to see the decorated houses– ours never had the lights and doo-dads, but we liked […]
- 2005
- Year End Bloggings (No Rest for Spammers) I’ve finally caught up with my other colleagues in getting into relaxed, holiday, not-at-the-office for a while mode. One of the nice side perks of working in education is getting their holiday schedule, so I am away from the building until January 3, hibernating up in our comfy cabin in Strawberry, in frequently sipping the […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 7 posts previously published on December 24th
- 2022
- Convergence/Divergence It’s six o’clock PM, the outside solar lighting (aka the sun) has turned off, the temperature outside has warmed up from *&#^ing cold (where Fahrenheit and Celsius converge), we are cozy inside with warm drinks, silly movies, and completely unplugged, diverged from the w-o-r-k stuff. And this Christmas eve converges with the seventh night of […] ➡
- 2017
- Chopping Ancestors from WordPress oEmbedded Tweets When I embed a tweet in my post, that’s all I want. But WordPress, and the Twitter API, wants to give me more. I don’t have to accept that. What am I blabbering about now? Well in a recent post where I am talking about using WordPress to publish your own versions of the soon […] ➡
- 2016
- Year of the D-O-G Dear ___________, I had grand(iose) intentions of sending you a traditional holiday card. I sent out 12 of them, but sadly, your name was farther down the list in my contacts, and I ran out of stamps. I also ran out of non-pithy variations of what I could write above/below the pith salutations in store-bought […] ➡
- 2014
- The New JIME Is Here! Navin R. CogDog: The new JIME’s here! The new JIME’s here! Harry Groom: Boy, I wish I could get that excited about nothing. Navin R. CogDog: Nothing? Are you kidding? Page 106 – Levine, Alan H.! I’m somebody now! Millions of people look at this paper everyday! This is the kind of education publicity – […] ➡
- 2012
- I GIFly GIFfed a GIFfy 2012 GIF! Sure, the Oxford American Dictionary made the verb “to GIF” a word of the year, but they fell short– it should be noun, adjective, adverb, maybe even present past participle of the year, too. Yes, it’s the peak of ds106 GIFfest. And I did not even get close to sending out real holiday cards this […] ➡
- 2010
- I’ll Take All of the Holidays for 500, Alec I’m ambiholidayous– I’ll celebrate anything. While growing up in a Jewish home in Baltimore, we had Hannukah this time of year. At the same time, one of my Dad’s favorite activities was taking me for a walk in the neighborhood to see the decorated houses– ours never had the lights and doo-dads, but we liked […] ➡
- 2005
- Year End Bloggings (No Rest for Spammers) I’ve finally caught up with my other colleagues in getting into relaxed, holiday, not-at-the-office for a while mode. One of the nice side perks of working in education is getting their holiday schedule, so I am away from the building until January 3, hibernating up in our comfy cabin in Strawberry, in frequently sipping the […] ➡
// 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.
