“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 10 posts previously published on October 16th
- 2018
- For Her Birthday, another episode of Granny’s Stories The calendar reminder notifies me that yesterday would have been my grandmother’s 113th birthday. If I could talk to her, I’d tease about that being a lucky number. She would laugh that cackle I loved hearing. What I do have is audio I recorded with her in 1994 on actual tape (micro-cassette) . Granny’s Tape […]
- 2017
- SPLOTpoint: Now With Arrow Key Navigation It’s good to have short cuts. I’m a mad spree of code update for my pile of WordPress themes I plan to use in my workshops down under. One thing I noticed in my own dog-fooding with the SPLOTpoint I built as a presentation platform. The navigation between “slides” is way down at the bottom: […]
- 2016
- Noble Bob Stopped By Editors Note: This blog has a strict policy agains guest posts, but sometimes you have to relax the rules. My pal Bob stopped by unexpectedly and rather made himself at home. He wrote this. Heya. This here Arizona scenery is more spectacular than Alan let on. Life got a little crazy last week, and I […]
- 2011
- Double Spubble I have the ds106 fever- I could not resist Jim Groom’s new Spubble assignment (still looking for the tags in the ds106 assignment mix see http://ds106.us/2011/10/16/your-very-own-spubble/): Learn to love yourself, grab a picture of yourself in which your body language, actions, gestures, etc. suggest one thing and then play off that using a speech bubble. […]
- Dr Oliver Bird Call cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by noii’s Since Michael Branson Smith’s ds106 class is moving into the audio portion of the course, I devised a new assignment for the audio section. And this is something I need as well in my own adventure to find the Center of the Internet. So […]
- How Innocent People End Up Fugitives Before I left the railroad car I was trapped in, I had time to fill, so played around with the Triple Troll Quotes assignment again for ds106. Given my current situation, I found the perfect theme, and 2/3 are hitchcockian Got them? The answer lies elsewhere. Share this barking on social media
- Escaping the Hatch Good morning everyone and thanks for the stream of messages. It really helps me cope as I have yet had any contact with other people in over 48 hours. I want to send a big shout out to Rowan Peter who has taken on the search aid from Melbourne. I was going to say “From […]
- 2004
- Email as the Most Used And Worst Method of “Knowledge Management” Email is the communication norm. It is no more special than the phone. But it is the worst way to manage information over time or the “KM” buzzword (which by the way I have never understood— “mamaging knowledge”, it sounds like managing “wisdom” or quantifying ethics or s snipe hunt). I have noticed recently, in […]
- Stoopid Web Design Confounded By Stoopider Customer Service As a single developer, I have programmed and designed a number of web transaction systems, and not one of them was limited to use on platform or web browsers (well to be honest, our 1998 Hero’s Journey site has some JavaScript quirks that prevent full use on some browsers, then again, I had no idea […]
- 2003
- “Building the MLX…” presentation Faithful CDB readers get this early glimpse at Building an Innovation Collection (with a bit of Competition and Bribery), a presentation for Monday, October 20, at the League for Innovation Conference on Information Technology in Milwaukee. This is less a technical presentation and more about the strategies we have used to (try and) build up […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 10 posts previously published on October 16th
- 2018
- For Her Birthday, another episode of Granny’s Stories The calendar reminder notifies me that yesterday would have been my grandmother’s 113th birthday. If I could talk to her, I’d tease about that being a lucky number. She would laugh that cackle I loved hearing. What I do have is audio I recorded with her in 1994 on actual tape (micro-cassette) . Granny’s Tape […] ➡
- 2017
- SPLOTpoint: Now With Arrow Key Navigation It’s good to have short cuts. I’m a mad spree of code update for my pile of WordPress themes I plan to use in my workshops down under. One thing I noticed in my own dog-fooding with the SPLOTpoint I built as a presentation platform. The navigation between “slides” is way down at the bottom: […] ➡
- 2016
- Noble Bob Stopped By Editors Note: This blog has a strict policy agains guest posts, but sometimes you have to relax the rules. My pal Bob stopped by unexpectedly and rather made himself at home. He wrote this. Heya. This here Arizona scenery is more spectacular than Alan let on. Life got a little crazy last week, and I […] ➡
- 2011
- Double Spubble I have the ds106 fever- I could not resist Jim Groom’s new Spubble assignment (still looking for the tags in the ds106 assignment mix see http://ds106.us/2011/10/16/your-very-own-spubble/): Learn to love yourself, grab a picture of yourself in which your body language, actions, gestures, etc. suggest one thing and then play off that using a speech bubble. […] ➡
- Dr Oliver Bird Call cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by noii’s Since Michael Branson Smith’s ds106 class is moving into the audio portion of the course, I devised a new assignment for the audio section. And this is something I need as well in my own adventure to find the Center of the Internet. So […] ➡
- How Innocent People End Up Fugitives Before I left the railroad car I was trapped in, I had time to fill, so played around with the Triple Troll Quotes assignment again for ds106. Given my current situation, I found the perfect theme, and 2/3 are hitchcockian Got them? The answer lies elsewhere. Share this barking on social media ➡
- Escaping the Hatch Good morning everyone and thanks for the stream of messages. It really helps me cope as I have yet had any contact with other people in over 48 hours. I want to send a big shout out to Rowan Peter who has taken on the search aid from Melbourne. I was going to say “From […] ➡
- 2004
- Email as the Most Used And Worst Method of “Knowledge Management” Email is the communication norm. It is no more special than the phone. But it is the worst way to manage information over time or the “KM” buzzword (which by the way I have never understood— “mamaging knowledge”, it sounds like managing “wisdom” or quantifying ethics or s snipe hunt). I have noticed recently, in […] ➡
- Stoopid Web Design Confounded By Stoopider Customer Service As a single developer, I have programmed and designed a number of web transaction systems, and not one of them was limited to use on platform or web browsers (well to be honest, our 1998 Hero’s Journey site has some JavaScript quirks that prevent full use on some browsers, then again, I had no idea […] ➡
- 2003
- “Building the MLX…” presentation Faithful CDB readers get this early glimpse at Building an Innovation Collection (with a bit of Competition and Bribery), a presentation for Monday, October 20, at the League for Innovation Conference on Information Technology in Milwaukee. This is less a technical presentation and more about the strategies we have used to (try and) build up […] ➡
// 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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