“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 April 11th
- 2013
- It’s the Individual That’s Finished For all you reclaimers of the web, that was, or is… I’ve been immersed in the present future as portrayed in the past, 1976 to be precise. I’ve been a bit obsessed with the Paddy Chayefsky’s epic Network, which then was not a connection of people on digital lines, but of the television network. If […]
- Feed2JS: The Zombie I Cannot Kill Yesterday I put up the tombstone for Feed2JS, on its life support after 10 years. But like any good zombie, I just cannot kill it, it rose from the grave, and shall continue to provide free RSS content in your web sites, for FREE! Cartoon Zombie by ~Sabotender Brian Teller, a web developer in Hagerstown […]
- Recap Week 2/3 in Asia: Singapore cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Time keeps on running past me, teasing, “Nyeh nyeh, you are BEHIND on blogging”. Dirty scumbag, that Time. Now it is closing in one a month since my 3 week jaunt to parts of Asia, and huge tracts of land remain uncharted. Like anyone […]
- 2012
- Timelining My Way Down Memolane Web-based timeline tools have come a long way… since last year. I have a bunch (among like 30 tools) to update into 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story (not to mention a plan to yet redo the site a new way) (how do you like the run on parentheticals) (?). I am keen […]
- 2010
- Take My Whole Blog Post, Please? Why? cc licensed flickr photo shared by Iago A.R. Just because you can, does it mean you should? An interesting series of events, but I am left baffled as to why some web site would feel its okay to republish my blog post in its entirety, with the barest minimum of attribution. In this morning’s email […]
- Geotagging Photos in Aperture 3 I love photos and I love maps, but I’ve not been the best at doing both together. I almost never remember to go back to flickr and place my photos on the map, so less than 10% of my photos are geotagged. I really want the process to be automatic, the best I do is […]
- 2009
- Feed2JS One Step Forward One Step Back It’s been on my “one day I hope to” list to put some development effort into Feed2JS a thing I spawned back in the Cro-Magnum era of RSS as a tool to help people insert dynamic content into their web pages by a script that renders it via JavaScript. I totally got the idea from […]
- 2006
- Sometimes Generation Gaps Are Not So Wide With all the talk about the Net generation being so vastly, genetically different from… well everyone else, I try to avoid falling too much into the quick generalities. It’s too easy to apply labels when, as people, we are all on some sort of continuum. Like others, I have a live in subject to study. […]
- Steve-ing We acknowledge Steve Jobs is the master of presentations of Insanely Great Ideas. There are tons of blogs and sites extolling his mastery of simple, non bullet-point-riddled presentations and compelling stories. Can we all be more Steve-like in our communications? As described in Steve’s Stories… (at Creating Passionate Users, great blog): He tells a story […]
- 2005
- Student with ePortfolio Wins Art Scholarship Actually, we are not sure if the ePortfolio had anything to do with it, but one of the members of the student panel discussions at our February Dialogue Day with Helen Barrett, Nestor Martinez got some good news. According to a post from his teacher, Dale Doubleday: On a different note, those of you that […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 10 posts previously published on April 11th
- 2013
- It’s the Individual That’s Finished For all you reclaimers of the web, that was, or is… I’ve been immersed in the present future as portrayed in the past, 1976 to be precise. I’ve been a bit obsessed with the Paddy Chayefsky’s epic Network, which then was not a connection of people on digital lines, but of the television network. If […] ➡
- Feed2JS: The Zombie I Cannot Kill Yesterday I put up the tombstone for Feed2JS, on its life support after 10 years. But like any good zombie, I just cannot kill it, it rose from the grave, and shall continue to provide free RSS content in your web sites, for FREE! Cartoon Zombie by ~Sabotender Brian Teller, a web developer in Hagerstown […] ➡
- Recap Week 2/3 in Asia: Singapore cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Time keeps on running past me, teasing, “Nyeh nyeh, you are BEHIND on blogging”. Dirty scumbag, that Time. Now it is closing in one a month since my 3 week jaunt to parts of Asia, and huge tracts of land remain uncharted. Like anyone […] ➡
- 2012
- Timelining My Way Down Memolane Web-based timeline tools have come a long way… since last year. I have a bunch (among like 30 tools) to update into 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story (not to mention a plan to yet redo the site a new way) (how do you like the run on parentheticals) (?). I am keen […] ➡
- 2010
- Take My Whole Blog Post, Please? Why? cc licensed flickr photo shared by Iago A.R. Just because you can, does it mean you should? An interesting series of events, but I am left baffled as to why some web site would feel its okay to republish my blog post in its entirety, with the barest minimum of attribution. In this morning’s email […] ➡
- Geotagging Photos in Aperture 3 I love photos and I love maps, but I’ve not been the best at doing both together. I almost never remember to go back to flickr and place my photos on the map, so less than 10% of my photos are geotagged. I really want the process to be automatic, the best I do is […] ➡
- 2009
- Feed2JS One Step Forward One Step Back It’s been on my “one day I hope to” list to put some development effort into Feed2JS a thing I spawned back in the Cro-Magnum era of RSS as a tool to help people insert dynamic content into their web pages by a script that renders it via JavaScript. I totally got the idea from […] ➡
- 2006
- Sometimes Generation Gaps Are Not So Wide With all the talk about the Net generation being so vastly, genetically different from… well everyone else, I try to avoid falling too much into the quick generalities. It’s too easy to apply labels when, as people, we are all on some sort of continuum. Like others, I have a live in subject to study. […] ➡
- Steve-ing We acknowledge Steve Jobs is the master of presentations of Insanely Great Ideas. There are tons of blogs and sites extolling his mastery of simple, non bullet-point-riddled presentations and compelling stories. Can we all be more Steve-like in our communications? As described in Steve’s Stories… (at Creating Passionate Users, great blog): He tells a story […] ➡
- 2005
- Student with ePortfolio Wins Art Scholarship Actually, we are not sure if the ePortfolio had anything to do with it, but one of the members of the student panel discussions at our February Dialogue Day with Helen Barrett, Nestor Martinez got some good news. According to a post from his teacher, Dale Doubleday: On a different note, those of you that […] ➡
// 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.
