“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 12 posts previously published on June 23rd
- 2022
- Blogging as/in Discourse Once again in the “spent too much time creating a clever title” department, I am here not to delve into Foucault analysis (and I had to look that one up). I can take the opening Wikipedia line on the article as “Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of […]
- 2021
- Some Shiny SPLOTs Spotted I’ve not have much time over last days weeks more to do much SPLOT tinkering (well there is one experimental feature in the works). But I got a burst of positive energy this week from the passing of a green Scooby Doo type van labeled Reclaim Roadshow. Some tweets were spotted about their current online […]
- 2014
- A Juicy Associative Trail The trails of distraction. If I worked for anyone else besides myself, I might get fired for my wanderings. This all started at lunch time, I noticed I had about six oranges in my fridge, and that also I was out of orange juice. I thought I would take a few moments to squeeze them […]
- 2013
- Unjamming Oneself cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine You don’t plan for these things. If you did, there would be no challenge to overcome. I would not call myself super mechanically adept, but today was a bit of reinforcement of what I can do when I need to. But the platitudes […]
- 2012
- Love Love That Dog cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog As part of doing some sessions at UBC in June, I got some gift cards to use at the bookstore, and picked up some heavy pieces of literature. That was sarcasm, but I also got a Philip K Dick novel, a mini guide to post […]
- Lover Bird Calls cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Vijay.. I took a spin on the random button for the ds106 audio asignments and ha ha ha, I got one I had submitted, Character Bird Calls: Like some people use special whistles to attract birds, your task is to create an 30 second […]
- 2007
- A D’Arcy Inspired History of Blog Riffing from D’Arcy’s idea and cleaner sketch, I tried mapping out the blog history of cogdogblog.com April 19, 2003: CogDogBlog 1.0 launched on maricopa server jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan using MovableType April 26, 2005 Migrated blog to WordPress (1.5) leaving old one as archive and moving new one to jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/cdb – Content was exported from MovableType (comments were […]
- 2006
- 16 New Whoppers! Digital Stories I’ve never done it formally, but have been in the periphery of some of the best folks who teach digital storytelling. My former colleagues at Maricopa, Linds Hicks, Rachel Woodburn, and Cheryl Colan have been generating magic for years (and right now they are weaving the same magic in New Zealand- Cheryl is even managing […]
- Catch UP- Thrift Store Books It was well over a year ago I wrote a little piece about Reader2, the site that allows you to use a search form to pull up bibliographic data on books, tag ’em , tag suggestions, folksonomy, syndication, etc, all that funky 2.0 kind of tasty activity. My little experiment was to load up the […]
- 2005
- I am a Reluctant, Invisible Participant in a Wretched Project I am in pain. This hurts. There is a telephone conference blabbing on my desk, and I am ignoring it. This is a technology project coming out of a large organization we are members of, and I have been tapped to be our system’s rep. It is aiming to create yet another searchable archive of […]
- A Better Cat Diary I really should be doing other work, but I thought of a quick improvement to the Built In Blogger presentation I did at the NMC 2005 Summer Conference on “More Than Cat Diaries: Publishing With Weblogs”… the hiding and showing of slide notes (using the “+/- notes” button in the top left) displayed a CSS […]
- It’s All Irish To Me Does anyone out there read/speak Irish? One recent message among the several thousand we get via our Writing HTML tutorial comes from a .ie domain email address, so I am guessing this is in Irish: Fógra faoi Rúndacht agus Síniú Leictreonach: Tá an ríomhphost seo agus aon iatán a ghabhann leis rúnda agus tharlódh go […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 12 posts previously published on June 23rd
- 2022
- Blogging as/in Discourse Once again in the “spent too much time creating a clever title” department, I am here not to delve into Foucault analysis (and I had to look that one up). I can take the opening Wikipedia line on the article as “Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of […] ➡
- 2021
- Some Shiny SPLOTs Spotted I’ve not have much time over last days weeks more to do much SPLOT tinkering (well there is one experimental feature in the works). But I got a burst of positive energy this week from the passing of a green Scooby Doo type van labeled Reclaim Roadshow. Some tweets were spotted about their current online […] ➡
- 2014
- A Juicy Associative Trail The trails of distraction. If I worked for anyone else besides myself, I might get fired for my wanderings. This all started at lunch time, I noticed I had about six oranges in my fridge, and that also I was out of orange juice. I thought I would take a few moments to squeeze them […] ➡
- 2013
- Unjamming Oneself cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine You don’t plan for these things. If you did, there would be no challenge to overcome. I would not call myself super mechanically adept, but today was a bit of reinforcement of what I can do when I need to. But the platitudes […] ➡
- 2012
- Love Love That Dog cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog As part of doing some sessions at UBC in June, I got some gift cards to use at the bookstore, and picked up some heavy pieces of literature. That was sarcasm, but I also got a Philip K Dick novel, a mini guide to post […] ➡
- Lover Bird Calls cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Vijay.. I took a spin on the random button for the ds106 audio asignments and ha ha ha, I got one I had submitted, Character Bird Calls: Like some people use special whistles to attract birds, your task is to create an 30 second […] ➡
- 2007
- A D’Arcy Inspired History of Blog Riffing from D’Arcy’s idea and cleaner sketch, I tried mapping out the blog history of cogdogblog.com April 19, 2003: CogDogBlog 1.0 launched on maricopa server jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan using MovableType April 26, 2005 Migrated blog to WordPress (1.5) leaving old one as archive and moving new one to jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/cdb – Content was exported from MovableType (comments were […] ➡
- 2006
- 16 New Whoppers! Digital Stories I’ve never done it formally, but have been in the periphery of some of the best folks who teach digital storytelling. My former colleagues at Maricopa, Linds Hicks, Rachel Woodburn, and Cheryl Colan have been generating magic for years (and right now they are weaving the same magic in New Zealand- Cheryl is even managing […] ➡
- Catch UP- Thrift Store Books It was well over a year ago I wrote a little piece about Reader2, the site that allows you to use a search form to pull up bibliographic data on books, tag ’em , tag suggestions, folksonomy, syndication, etc, all that funky 2.0 kind of tasty activity. My little experiment was to load up the […] ➡
- 2005
- I am a Reluctant, Invisible Participant in a Wretched Project I am in pain. This hurts. There is a telephone conference blabbing on my desk, and I am ignoring it. This is a technology project coming out of a large organization we are members of, and I have been tapped to be our system’s rep. It is aiming to create yet another searchable archive of […] ➡
- A Better Cat Diary I really should be doing other work, but I thought of a quick improvement to the Built In Blogger presentation I did at the NMC 2005 Summer Conference on “More Than Cat Diaries: Publishing With Weblogs”… the hiding and showing of slide notes (using the “+/- notes” button in the top left) displayed a CSS […] ➡
- It’s All Irish To Me Does anyone out there read/speak Irish? One recent message among the several thousand we get via our Writing HTML tutorial comes from a .ie domain email address, so I am guessing this is in Irish: Fógra faoi Rúndacht agus Síniú Leictreonach: Tá an ríomhphost seo agus aon iatán a ghabhann leis rúnda agus tharlódh go […] ➡
// 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.
