“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 21 posts previously published on November 7th
- 2023
- Training vs Cited Sources or is Bing 60,000 Times Better Than… I’m cratering and writing about AI. Call me a lemming. Stop the presses. Where are the presses? All the time in webinars and discussions about AI there is much weeping and wailing… no actually there is not, but much concern about what Large Language Models are trained on. Often its the vein of “they are […]
- 2022
- Hello DALL-E, Looking Swell, DALL-E but… The churn of techno-fadism is at warp speed 9. Already left behind is blockchain, NFTs and despite the imploding star of twitter-verse, it feels like it’s AI* all the time. In trying to generate some discussion activity over at the OEG Connect community site I have been fiddling with since 2020, I tried a pseudo […]
- 2018
- Instagram Adpot: #count6 numbers decreasing Mystery numbers. It was a Lost thing, not lost on data fueled advertising. It was back in March 2016 I started noticing first the presence, than the patterned appearance of what Instagram calls “sponsored”, a fancy name for the kind of advertising that can be mistaken for content. I had a #count6 thing going, and […]
- 2016
- In the MOOD: Sharing the Certification Project at Open Education 2016 In a presentation last Friday at the 2016 Open Education Conference Paul Stacey and I described the Certification project as “Massive Open OER Development.” MOOD? People who know me know how much I think of acronyms that start with M-O-0… (that was meant to be wry humor) Hearing about @creativecommons 'certificate' prog – awesomeness with […]
- The Pretty Good, Not So Bad, and Conference Conundrum of #OpenEd16 In which this tired blogger fails to summarize a conference experience, and gives up before even trying… With clocks flipping in some corners of the world, last night I’m just home from a week in Virginia for the 2016 Open Education Conference. That’s it’s 13th iteration, maybe my fourth. Here is the usual conference after […]
- 2015
- Internet Time Pauses for Jay Cross I do not always look at my full twitter stream, but am both glad and saddened to read this message today: Still reeling from the news that my friend and colleague @jaycross has passed on. A big influence on me and the field of elearning. Vale. — Clark Quinn (@Quinnovator) November 7, 2015 The photo […]
- Trying Medium.com to Call Out Facebook’s Coddling of Catfishers Okay, I will let this go soon. But I wanted to get the word of Facebook’s shameful practices of allowing fake profiles to be created for scamming purpose and their opaqueness of reporting processes. SO I re-wrote my previous catfishing posts into a new article onto the Big Stage of Medium.com: Timothy Boostrom is Not […]
- 2012
- The (chess) (gif) Thing During the ramp up Election night i was visiting Bryan Alexander, and found a relevant movie to watch, John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). Relevant? Heck yes- shape shifting monsters that emerge every now and then from the ice? Watching of the early scenes, we smiled at the retro computer chess game that Kurt Russell’s character […]
- Not Stuck in the Jaws Last week was the part of ds106 where (cue the John Williams score -ba da ba da ba da) we approach maybe the most treacherous waters of creativity (underwater shot of woman swimming, legs kicking). VIDEO As our teaching of ds106 evolves, I”ve found it useful to start each new (new to the syllabus) media […]
- Cactus Bound cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It’s time for me to go hug a cactus. From a perch in the mountains of Vermont, winter knocking at the door, I am going to be starting today the looping road back to my home in Strawberry Arizona. Excepting a month in July when […]
- 2011
- Tasmanian Convergence cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by James Jordan My best plans are accidental. Dripping with serendipity. And this is happening again first week of December. It was with boundless excitement on visiting Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach I found myself on offer of a trip to Melbourne to do a keynote for her Powerful […]
- #occupycanada cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by ailatan Okay, I admit right here it is cheesy cheap to grab attempt with an #occupy title, but that is where I am headed tomorrow, on my continued mission to become Canadian. This has been a long running effort, going back to 2003 or […]
- Nomads or Nomadic cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by saamiblog For this week’s change11 it is becoming much more clear with Dave’s posting of the presentation he did for Alec Corous’s class. The idea of the noble nomad, alone, surviving, self directed… becomes romanticized (maybe not standing in front of a tent with […]
- 2010
- A TEDxPHX-cellent Day cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog On Saturday I drove down the hill to meet up with some of my former Maricopa colleagues at the TEDxPHX, the local independent TED event. If it were not for the CybersalonAZ pals, I might not have gone. Previously, I made have thumbed my nose at what looks […]
- 2008
- The Revolution is Syndicated! (and the zombies immolated) Many will regret (or will lie and say they were there) missing last night’s presentation performance by Jim Groom and Tom Woodard as the norm-blowing closing act for the 2008 NMC Rock the Academy Symposium. You have to wade through this blog post to get to the video recording 😉 Donning their gas masks, flame […]
- 2007
- Story Circles: Approaches for Mining Great Stories presentation by Joe Lambert at NMC Regional Conference at Tulane. This session will discuss a range of approaches from the field of media arts in capturing stories, from creative writing prompts, to interview techniques, to place-based recordings, and talking into images and film. Come learn what works, what doesn’t, and what might be best suited […]
- Not the Sunday Funnies: Lessons from Webcomics Not the Sunday Funnies: Lessons from Webcomics presentation by Ruben Puentadora at NMC Regional Conference at Tulane. It all began in 1993 with a one-panel comic called “Doctor Fun,” published on the University of Chicago Library website. Others soon followed, and today the webcomic is a flourishing medium, with thousands of authors uploading their creations […]
- Power of Old Media in New Orleans Opening keynote for the NMC Regional Conference at Tulane is Words and Music, Crafts and Costumes, Ritual and… Radio: The Power of Old Media in New Orleans by Nick Spitzer, of American Routes “the radio program from New Orleans devoted to the sources and symbols of blues and jazz, country and gospel, roots rock and […]
- 2005
- Hooked on Glu Taking the cue from Stephen Downes who took it from Jay Cross, I quickly checked out SuperGlu a new Web.0 tool that aggregates anything that you may have stored elswhere that provides an RSS feed… SuprGlu is about bringing the pieces of your web content together into one central place for you, your friends, and […]
- 2003
- Seat of the Pants iSight Demo Later today I am doing a risky demo at our Ocotillo Online learning Group Meeting. Most technology is a risky in demo mode– here I am showing off the two-way desktop video capability of Apple’s iSight/iChatAV. I’ve got a good number of people, both in the Phoenix area and scattered across the US, Canada, even […]
- A Thousand PowerPoint(less)s of Light? Some interesting ideas at the IA Think blog on PowerPoint and Idea Development including the often linked (and still a riot) PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg address. But this post is not just another lambast at the results sometimes called “no power and no point”– the author has a valid wonder about the value of […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 21 posts previously published on November 7th
- 2023
- Training vs Cited Sources or is Bing 60,000 Times Better Than… I’m cratering and writing about AI. Call me a lemming. Stop the presses. Where are the presses? All the time in webinars and discussions about AI there is much weeping and wailing… no actually there is not, but much concern about what Large Language Models are trained on. Often its the vein of “they are […] ➡
- 2022
- Hello DALL-E, Looking Swell, DALL-E but… The churn of techno-fadism is at warp speed 9. Already left behind is blockchain, NFTs and despite the imploding star of twitter-verse, it feels like it’s AI* all the time. In trying to generate some discussion activity over at the OEG Connect community site I have been fiddling with since 2020, I tried a pseudo […] ➡
- 2018
- Instagram Adpot: #count6 numbers decreasing Mystery numbers. It was a Lost thing, not lost on data fueled advertising. It was back in March 2016 I started noticing first the presence, than the patterned appearance of what Instagram calls “sponsored”, a fancy name for the kind of advertising that can be mistaken for content. I had a #count6 thing going, and […] ➡
- 2016
- In the MOOD: Sharing the Certification Project at Open Education 2016 In a presentation last Friday at the 2016 Open Education Conference Paul Stacey and I described the Certification project as “Massive Open OER Development.” MOOD? People who know me know how much I think of acronyms that start with M-O-0… (that was meant to be wry humor) Hearing about @creativecommons 'certificate' prog – awesomeness with […] ➡
- The Pretty Good, Not So Bad, and Conference Conundrum of #OpenEd16 In which this tired blogger fails to summarize a conference experience, and gives up before even trying… With clocks flipping in some corners of the world, last night I’m just home from a week in Virginia for the 2016 Open Education Conference. That’s it’s 13th iteration, maybe my fourth. Here is the usual conference after […] ➡
- 2015
- Internet Time Pauses for Jay Cross I do not always look at my full twitter stream, but am both glad and saddened to read this message today: Still reeling from the news that my friend and colleague @jaycross has passed on. A big influence on me and the field of elearning. Vale. — Clark Quinn (@Quinnovator) November 7, 2015 The photo […] ➡
- Trying Medium.com to Call Out Facebook’s Coddling of Catfishers Okay, I will let this go soon. But I wanted to get the word of Facebook’s shameful practices of allowing fake profiles to be created for scamming purpose and their opaqueness of reporting processes. SO I re-wrote my previous catfishing posts into a new article onto the Big Stage of Medium.com: Timothy Boostrom is Not […] ➡
- 2012
- The (chess) (gif) Thing During the ramp up Election night i was visiting Bryan Alexander, and found a relevant movie to watch, John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). Relevant? Heck yes- shape shifting monsters that emerge every now and then from the ice? Watching of the early scenes, we smiled at the retro computer chess game that Kurt Russell’s character […] ➡
- Not Stuck in the Jaws Last week was the part of ds106 where (cue the John Williams score -ba da ba da ba da) we approach maybe the most treacherous waters of creativity (underwater shot of woman swimming, legs kicking). VIDEO As our teaching of ds106 evolves, I”ve found it useful to start each new (new to the syllabus) media […] ➡
- Cactus Bound cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It’s time for me to go hug a cactus. From a perch in the mountains of Vermont, winter knocking at the door, I am going to be starting today the looping road back to my home in Strawberry Arizona. Excepting a month in July when […] ➡
- 2011
- Tasmanian Convergence cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by James Jordan My best plans are accidental. Dripping with serendipity. And this is happening again first week of December. It was with boundless excitement on visiting Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach I found myself on offer of a trip to Melbourne to do a keynote for her Powerful […] ➡
- #occupycanada cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by ailatan Okay, I admit right here it is cheesy cheap to grab attempt with an #occupy title, but that is where I am headed tomorrow, on my continued mission to become Canadian. This has been a long running effort, going back to 2003 or […] ➡
- Nomads or Nomadic cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by saamiblog For this week’s change11 it is becoming much more clear with Dave’s posting of the presentation he did for Alec Corous’s class. The idea of the noble nomad, alone, surviving, self directed… becomes romanticized (maybe not standing in front of a tent with […] ➡
- 2010
- A TEDxPHX-cellent Day cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog On Saturday I drove down the hill to meet up with some of my former Maricopa colleagues at the TEDxPHX, the local independent TED event. If it were not for the CybersalonAZ pals, I might not have gone. Previously, I made have thumbed my nose at what looks […] ➡
- 2008
- The Revolution is Syndicated! (and the zombies immolated) Many will regret (or will lie and say they were there) missing last night’s presentation performance by Jim Groom and Tom Woodard as the norm-blowing closing act for the 2008 NMC Rock the Academy Symposium. You have to wade through this blog post to get to the video recording 😉 Donning their gas masks, flame […] ➡
- 2007
- Story Circles: Approaches for Mining Great Stories presentation by Joe Lambert at NMC Regional Conference at Tulane. This session will discuss a range of approaches from the field of media arts in capturing stories, from creative writing prompts, to interview techniques, to place-based recordings, and talking into images and film. Come learn what works, what doesn’t, and what might be best suited […] ➡
- Not the Sunday Funnies: Lessons from Webcomics Not the Sunday Funnies: Lessons from Webcomics presentation by Ruben Puentadora at NMC Regional Conference at Tulane. It all began in 1993 with a one-panel comic called “Doctor Fun,” published on the University of Chicago Library website. Others soon followed, and today the webcomic is a flourishing medium, with thousands of authors uploading their creations […] ➡
- Power of Old Media in New Orleans Opening keynote for the NMC Regional Conference at Tulane is Words and Music, Crafts and Costumes, Ritual and… Radio: The Power of Old Media in New Orleans by Nick Spitzer, of American Routes “the radio program from New Orleans devoted to the sources and symbols of blues and jazz, country and gospel, roots rock and […] ➡
- 2005
- Hooked on Glu Taking the cue from Stephen Downes who took it from Jay Cross, I quickly checked out SuperGlu a new Web.0 tool that aggregates anything that you may have stored elswhere that provides an RSS feed… SuprGlu is about bringing the pieces of your web content together into one central place for you, your friends, and […] ➡
- 2003
- Seat of the Pants iSight Demo Later today I am doing a risky demo at our Ocotillo Online learning Group Meeting. Most technology is a risky in demo mode– here I am showing off the two-way desktop video capability of Apple’s iSight/iChatAV. I’ve got a good number of people, both in the Phoenix area and scattered across the US, Canada, even […] ➡
- A Thousand PowerPoint(less)s of Light? Some interesting ideas at the IA Think blog on PowerPoint and Idea Development including the often linked (and still a riot) PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg address. But this post is not just another lambast at the results sometimes called “no power and no point”– the author has a valid wonder about the value of […] ➡
// 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.
