“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 13 posts previously published on July 2nd
- 2024
- Not Dead Yet. Humanly Made, Shared, Attributed, and Thanked for Photographs Claims of technical death are always overrated, but in the hell mell rush and glee for the synthetic cartoon garish sadly robotic “style” of generative AI imagery I for one remain thrilled by the small acts of thanks. These acts are “generated” from the closing in (if I can catch up on the backlog) of […]
- 2013
- I #LikeEverything Actually I don’t like Facebook. There’s just not a button for that, which seems to break some cosmic physical law of conservation of emotions. I think likes are cheap not unimportant, but pretty close. If it were so real, why do we wrap the now meaning less words in quotes? But some nights, in bed […]
- ds106 Daily Create Challenge (2); Drawing with Ruby’s Art Pad cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Good morning troopers! Who is ready to make art today? This is my second day’s effort for the ds106 July 2013 Daily Create Challenge I issued yesterday. I am 2/2! It’s not about doing them all, its about doing as many as you […]
- ds106 Daily Create Challenge 1: My Ingredients cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Enokson In the eating my own dog food department (really not a problem, brown crunchy bits of dried discarded carcasses and grains is yummy), Here goes my first days exercises for the ds106 July 2013 Daily Create Challenge I issued yesterday. I am aiming for […]
- 2012
- Learning Birding cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I do not know my finch from a grackle- my extent of observing birds is being able to say, “there’s a bird”. During my visit in Vancouver, I was fortunate to spend an outing with my colleague Michelle Lamberson from UBC, who continually astounds many […]
- 2008
- Slimming the Listservs If the web is at 2.0, then listserv technology must be at a fractional decimal too small to bother writing. I first experienced them around 1988 as a graduate student at Arizona State University- heck it was even before full internet, as my email address was on BITNET. I helped a prof administer a listerv […]
- Still Cannot Break Up With Twitter As much as I like to poke fun at twitter’s reliable flakiness and curse the fail whale… For inexplicable reasons, I stay. Again, twitter is not essential. My days go in fine with or without it. What value is it? No… scratch all of that. Twitter just saved me from a huge gaffe. And it […]
- Photo Plays Supporting Role in Awesome PhotoShop Tutorial How about yet one more example of neat things that happen when you share your stuff? This is a photo I posted a month ago on flickr; it is a wooden drafting table my Dad had used back in the 1950s and after years of storage in an attic, I decided to re stain it: […]
- 2007
- A Cheap Lynnetter Knockoff A Cheap Lynnetter Knockoff posted 3 Jul ’07, 12.04am MDT PST on flickr Play is integral to this thing we call "work" in the new net space, not bounded by walls, old rules of behavior, etc. Where is the carefully drawn line between work and play? Dr Angela Thomas recognizes this dynamic of pleasure and […]
- A Powerful Set of Images, Ideas most people over 30 have trouble grasping why would want digital version of yourself posted 15 Dec ’06, 6.51am MST PST on flickr There used to be all this talk of the “digital divide” and it was between the haves & the have-nots in terms of what they could afford. But I think there is […]
- I’m an x.1, Maybe x.2 Version Sort of Person It’s Monday, and I do not have an iPhone. The forecast is more of the same, for a long time. The mania, pro/con commentary is impressive for the sheer amount of energy generated/expended. Seriously, when was the time people camped out for a phone (yes, I know it is more than a phone)? And there […]
- 2006
- Hold the Truck! Mouse Pleads for Mercy How is that for Apple listening? A day after I threaten to drive my GMC truck over a blue toothless mouse, the Mac OS 10.4.7 update contains an update to improve bluetooth communication with mouse devices! So far so good, as the mouse has been able to have activated 100% of the time (about 7 […]
- 2003
- Generational Word Association Each May we organize a year-end “Ocotillo” retreat for faculty and staff in our system to spend some focused time on instructional technology issues. This year, the theme was “Guess Who’s Coming To Learn?”: What do we know about our students and their motivations for learning? Are our planning activities based on our own assumptions […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 13 posts previously published on July 2nd
- 2024
- 2013
- I #LikeEverything Actually I don’t like Facebook. There’s just not a button for that, which seems to break some cosmic physical law of conservation of emotions. I think likes are cheap not unimportant, but pretty close. If it were so real, why do we wrap the now meaning less words in quotes? But some nights, in bed […] ➡
- ds106 Daily Create Challenge (2); Drawing with Ruby’s Art Pad cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Good morning troopers! Who is ready to make art today? This is my second day’s effort for the ds106 July 2013 Daily Create Challenge I issued yesterday. I am 2/2! It’s not about doing them all, its about doing as many as you […] ➡
- ds106 Daily Create Challenge 1: My Ingredients cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Enokson In the eating my own dog food department (really not a problem, brown crunchy bits of dried discarded carcasses and grains is yummy), Here goes my first days exercises for the ds106 July 2013 Daily Create Challenge I issued yesterday. I am aiming for […] ➡
- 2012
- Learning Birding cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I do not know my finch from a grackle- my extent of observing birds is being able to say, “there’s a bird”. During my visit in Vancouver, I was fortunate to spend an outing with my colleague Michelle Lamberson from UBC, who continually astounds many […] ➡
- 2008
- Slimming the Listservs If the web is at 2.0, then listserv technology must be at a fractional decimal too small to bother writing. I first experienced them around 1988 as a graduate student at Arizona State University- heck it was even before full internet, as my email address was on BITNET. I helped a prof administer a listerv […] ➡
- Still Cannot Break Up With Twitter As much as I like to poke fun at twitter’s reliable flakiness and curse the fail whale… For inexplicable reasons, I stay. Again, twitter is not essential. My days go in fine with or without it. What value is it? No… scratch all of that. Twitter just saved me from a huge gaffe. And it […] ➡
- Photo Plays Supporting Role in Awesome PhotoShop Tutorial How about yet one more example of neat things that happen when you share your stuff? This is a photo I posted a month ago on flickr; it is a wooden drafting table my Dad had used back in the 1950s and after years of storage in an attic, I decided to re stain it: […] ➡
- 2007
- A Cheap Lynnetter Knockoff A Cheap Lynnetter Knockoff posted 3 Jul ’07, 12.04am MDT PST on flickr Play is integral to this thing we call "work" in the new net space, not bounded by walls, old rules of behavior, etc. Where is the carefully drawn line between work and play? Dr Angela Thomas recognizes this dynamic of pleasure and […] ➡
- A Powerful Set of Images, Ideas most people over 30 have trouble grasping why would want digital version of yourself posted 15 Dec ’06, 6.51am MST PST on flickr There used to be all this talk of the “digital divide” and it was between the haves & the have-nots in terms of what they could afford. But I think there is […] ➡
- I’m an x.1, Maybe x.2 Version Sort of Person It’s Monday, and I do not have an iPhone. The forecast is more of the same, for a long time. The mania, pro/con commentary is impressive for the sheer amount of energy generated/expended. Seriously, when was the time people camped out for a phone (yes, I know it is more than a phone)? And there […] ➡
- 2006
- Hold the Truck! Mouse Pleads for Mercy How is that for Apple listening? A day after I threaten to drive my GMC truck over a blue toothless mouse, the Mac OS 10.4.7 update contains an update to improve bluetooth communication with mouse devices! So far so good, as the mouse has been able to have activated 100% of the time (about 7 […] ➡
- 2003
- Generational Word Association Each May we organize a year-end “Ocotillo” retreat for faculty and staff in our system to spend some focused time on instructional technology issues. This year, the theme was “Guess Who’s Coming To Learn?”: What do we know about our students and their motivations for learning? Are our planning activities based on our own assumptions […] ➡
// 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.
