“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 8 posts previously published on March 14th
- 2025
- Scritch and Cup Two unrelated things get connected, yet another installment of loving all the links, worth making a wish for. In the daily ritual department, Cori and I enjoy our first cup of coffee and conversation in bed. Well, she’s the early riser who ventures down to fetch our fresh java. After that, heading downstairs, already my […]
- 2022
- 6x6x2 Open Pedagogy 1980s Style Because my current work now is centered in open education, and coming off of Open Education Week, I was swimming much in conversations, workshops about Open Pedagogy (often as acronym OEP). I am not here to offer Yet Another Definition (check one of the best resources). I welcome this as moving beyond Open Education as […]
- True Stories Lightning Talk Mis-Strikes While lightning may not strike the same spot twice (debatable), I manage to keep recycling this same “True Stories of Openness” talk perhaps way too many times. It’s on tap as an Alt format session for OER22 but I gave it another warm up as a Creative Commons Lightning Talk for Open Education Week. Without […]
- 2019
- Openness, Not Just Licenses, Can Take You There I just popped a CD of blues music into the player. How it got here is a story with being in the mix of other True Stories of Sharing. Why? Well, that’s my own photo printed on the back cover. If the bass player (and also art producer) of the Blue Crawdads had followed the […]
- 2016
- Last Week’s Ride with the Badge Alliance Never underestimate the potential outcomes and echoes of a shot from the hip, mostly uninformed blog post. A few clicks back I blogged some thoughts, questions, and over generalizations on Seeking Evidence of Badge Evidence. To be honest, I looked only at a scant handful of badges, and was a tad dis-appointed in those that, […]
- 2012
- The One Worthy Session From SXSWedu cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Since I mentioned a desire to flip conferences, I have to say it was worth sitting in the front row of Jane McGonigal’s “Learning is an Epic Win” talk at SXSWedu, and frankly, it was just about the only non “Meh” session I attended. I […]
- 2005
- Report Card for Ocotillo Small Pieces Our Ocotillo project’s use of blogs+wikis+boards, coined last summer as “Small Technologies Loosely Joined”. The premise of this was that each of our 4 working groups would maintain a regularly updated blog as its public “face”, use discussion boards for some asynchronous dialogues (and guest experts), and the wikis for brainstorming. The suite of tools […]
- Call For More SkyperViews (some females would be helpful) Thanks for those who have volunteered so far for my 5 minute web audio interviews (see details). I have a few more days leeway in the process, and since the audio can be added as an online supplement, I can keep on doing them for the rest of the month or more. So far it […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 8 posts previously published on March 14th
- 2025
- Scritch and Cup Two unrelated things get connected, yet another installment of loving all the links, worth making a wish for. In the daily ritual department, Cori and I enjoy our first cup of coffee and conversation in bed. Well, she’s the early riser who ventures down to fetch our fresh java. After that, heading downstairs, already my […] ➡
- 2022
- 6x6x2 Open Pedagogy 1980s Style Because my current work now is centered in open education, and coming off of Open Education Week, I was swimming much in conversations, workshops about Open Pedagogy (often as acronym OEP). I am not here to offer Yet Another Definition (check one of the best resources). I welcome this as moving beyond Open Education as […] ➡
- True Stories Lightning Talk Mis-Strikes While lightning may not strike the same spot twice (debatable), I manage to keep recycling this same “True Stories of Openness” talk perhaps way too many times. It’s on tap as an Alt format session for OER22 but I gave it another warm up as a Creative Commons Lightning Talk for Open Education Week. Without […] ➡
- 2019
- Openness, Not Just Licenses, Can Take You There I just popped a CD of blues music into the player. How it got here is a story with being in the mix of other True Stories of Sharing. Why? Well, that’s my own photo printed on the back cover. If the bass player (and also art producer) of the Blue Crawdads had followed the […] ➡
- 2016
- Last Week’s Ride with the Badge Alliance Never underestimate the potential outcomes and echoes of a shot from the hip, mostly uninformed blog post. A few clicks back I blogged some thoughts, questions, and over generalizations on Seeking Evidence of Badge Evidence. To be honest, I looked only at a scant handful of badges, and was a tad dis-appointed in those that, […] ➡
- 2012
- The One Worthy Session From SXSWedu cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Since I mentioned a desire to flip conferences, I have to say it was worth sitting in the front row of Jane McGonigal’s “Learning is an Epic Win” talk at SXSWedu, and frankly, it was just about the only non “Meh” session I attended. I […] ➡
- 2005
- Report Card for Ocotillo Small Pieces Our Ocotillo project’s use of blogs+wikis+boards, coined last summer as “Small Technologies Loosely Joined”. The premise of this was that each of our 4 working groups would maintain a regularly updated blog as its public “face”, use discussion boards for some asynchronous dialogues (and guest experts), and the wikis for brainstorming. The suite of tools […] ➡
- Call For More SkyperViews (some females would be helpful) Thanks for those who have volunteered so far for my 5 minute web audio interviews (see details). I have a few more days leeway in the process, and since the audio can be added as an online supplement, I can keep on doing them for the rest of the month or more. So far it […] ➡
// 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.
