“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 9 posts previously published on January 14th
- 2022
- Dive into the Twitter Time Tunnel (or just hack your url way in) One tweet somehow manages to send me off to the web experimentation rabbit hole for building a new gizmo. But the bigger lesson is that knowing how to read, edit, and modify URL parameters can give you the power over the algorithmic lords. From One Tweet… I managed to just click this out of curiosity […]
- 2019
- Episode 8: Baby, It’s Cold! https://s3.amazonaws.com/prconnection/ep008.mp3 Talking to Antonio in December he made it sound like he was in a scene from The Day After...
- 2016
- Howdy #Western106 I’ve been so busy trying to get Western DS106 set up, making up personas, doing videos, I have not done a lick of work from Blog Riding Camp. People of the west don’t have much use for excuses. So I am done. So I am shooting some blog bullets as an intro. The first 2.5 […]
- 2014
- Always On, Never Ending– the Open ds106 Experience The Headless ds106 experiment we set up August-December 2013 had many successful points. Most was in the new influx of active participants, but the ending group project (not planned) was in terms of rich collaboration one of my peak ds106 experiences. But it was an experience that was still bound by time. It started and […]
- 2013
- Looking Ahead to ds106 cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog A bit earlier I looked into my rear view mirror at last semester’s ds106 class I taught online for the University of Mary Washington. Since then I have been deep inide the bowls of the ds106 ship, doing quite a bit of organizing and […]
- 2012
- Slice of Life 006: From a Crack in a Rock cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog On break from a long drive to California, I took respit via a hike in Joshua Tree National Park, hiking up Lower Cottomwood Wash to this place- wash meaning maybe some soul cleansing under the desert sun, or also in this case, the dry sandy […]
- 2009
- You Do What You Have to Do You Do What You Have to Do by cogdogblog posted 14 Jan ’09, 10.37pm MST PST on flickr Driving down to Phoenix tonight I stopped at a local Circle-K for some coffee and bottled water. I was surprised that the guy at the check out register was Dave, the guy I usually see down the […]
- 2005
- Alan’s Multipost Bookmarklet Tool Go, Dog Go http://cogdogblog.com/code/marklet_maker.php About Previously I have described a JavaScript bookmarklet tool I wrote for myseld so I could submit websites to multiple tracking sites. Maybe you too want to be able to do a one click submit to send sites to places like Furl or del.icio.us at the same time. http://cogdogblog.com/code/marklet_maker.php Thus I […]
- 2004
- Web Ten Years This year marks a number of ten year anniversaries for the web site we created in December 1993 for my office, the Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction (MCLI). This ran on a humble Macintosh SE/30 sitting on a table in the hallway— the very first web server in our organization, running what was then […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 9 posts previously published on January 14th
- 2022
- Dive into the Twitter Time Tunnel (or just hack your url way in) One tweet somehow manages to send me off to the web experimentation rabbit hole for building a new gizmo. But the bigger lesson is that knowing how to read, edit, and modify URL parameters can give you the power over the algorithmic lords. From One Tweet… I managed to just click this out of curiosity […] ➡
- 2019
- 2016
- Howdy #Western106 I’ve been so busy trying to get Western DS106 set up, making up personas, doing videos, I have not done a lick of work from Blog Riding Camp. People of the west don’t have much use for excuses. So I am done. So I am shooting some blog bullets as an intro. The first 2.5 […] ➡
- 2014
- Always On, Never Ending– the Open ds106 Experience The Headless ds106 experiment we set up August-December 2013 had many successful points. Most was in the new influx of active participants, but the ending group project (not planned) was in terms of rich collaboration one of my peak ds106 experiences. But it was an experience that was still bound by time. It started and […] ➡
- 2013
- Looking Ahead to ds106 cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog A bit earlier I looked into my rear view mirror at last semester’s ds106 class I taught online for the University of Mary Washington. Since then I have been deep inide the bowls of the ds106 ship, doing quite a bit of organizing and […] ➡
- 2012
- Slice of Life 006: From a Crack in a Rock cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog On break from a long drive to California, I took respit via a hike in Joshua Tree National Park, hiking up Lower Cottomwood Wash to this place- wash meaning maybe some soul cleansing under the desert sun, or also in this case, the dry sandy […] ➡
- 2009
- You Do What You Have to Do You Do What You Have to Do by cogdogblog posted 14 Jan ’09, 10.37pm MST PST on flickr Driving down to Phoenix tonight I stopped at a local Circle-K for some coffee and bottled water. I was surprised that the guy at the check out register was Dave, the guy I usually see down the […] ➡
- 2005
- Alan’s Multipost Bookmarklet Tool Go, Dog Go http://cogdogblog.com/code/marklet_maker.php About Previously I have described a JavaScript bookmarklet tool I wrote for myseld so I could submit websites to multiple tracking sites. Maybe you too want to be able to do a one click submit to send sites to places like Furl or del.icio.us at the same time. http://cogdogblog.com/code/marklet_maker.php Thus I […] ➡
- 2004
- Web Ten Years This year marks a number of ten year anniversaries for the web site we created in December 1993 for my office, the Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction (MCLI). This ran on a humble Macintosh SE/30 sitting on a table in the hallway— the very first web server in our organization, running what was then […] ➡
// 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.
