“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 December 8th
- 2024
- Roll Your Own Mastodon Starter Kits It looks like there is a crowd rush to jump from The Platform I will Only Ever Call Twitter to Bluesky. Huge numbers. Much because there is no learning curve. It looks and feels like Twitter not so olde. But also, folks are finding the just add water to the instant mix of the Bluesky […]
- 2019
- A Big SPLOTbox Full of a Lotta of Little Features BBFWLLT is a family joke/story. When my Mom asked what I wanted for a gift (singular), my little kid brain produced a clever strategy to get more out of the deal. I would ask for a “Big Box Full of a Whole Lotta Little Toys.” This feels like the perfect metaphor for the latest version […]
- 2016
- Shifting Those Google Form Data Spreadsheets into Reverse (Order) Nothing earth shaking or melting here, but an answer to an annoyance I have with some uses of Google Forms. I hate un-necessary scrolling. When you have the results go to a spreadsheet, one of the bothersome things is that new data gets added to the bottom. At some level, that means that I always […]
- 2014
- And There is Nixon and Elvis Oh Google, what you do with my keywords. Unexpected images, then leading me down some memories. It’s mostly connected in loose strands of unexpected fibers. So I am working on an icon for a new secret half formed thing Brian Lamb and I are cooking up here at TRU. The metaphor is somewhat in the […]
- 2013
- Daily Create Remix of a Remix of a … As an experiment, the last 4 ds106 Daily Creates have been designed hatched to be ones where each builds off of the last. I did this partly to see if such a thing would work, but maybe also as a repeatable activity in doing remixes where the participants build off of each other’s work. The […]
- 2012
- My God, It’s Full of Stories cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by entrelec No one denies the power of story. We are wired for storytelling. It’s the world’s oldest tradition. It’s what makes us human. It matters for game designers. It produces results in business. People who market brands and specialize in SEO are storytellers. And […]
- 2009
- Ford Wave cc licensed flickr photo shared by gamp Taking a page from Google, there is new announcement from the automobile industry: BillyBob and Melba Bootwaddle, the original creators of the reverse flow corn cob floating ball carburetor, will take the stage to unveil their latest project, Ford Wave. As BillyBob describes it, “Knowing what we do […]
- 2006
- Autograph My Mouse, Please… Just got back home from a tremendous 2 days of NMC meetings (wow, I never thought “tremendous” went with “meetings” but ours are) where I was able to check off one of my 43 people… the legendary Doug Engelbart. And of course the reflex association goes to “yeah, he’s the guy that invented the mouse…” […]
- 2005
- MCLI iForum Released We announced to Maricopa today the availability of our MCLI iForum at http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/iforum/ This is the first online version of the print publication we’ve run for many years. This is all built in WordPress. Our hope for upcoming issues is to have people submit drafts remotely, but with a time press, we had folks send […]
- 2004
- My Not So Greatest Playlist Meme of ’04 Just following the cue of Señor D’Arcy, here is what popped of the shuffling of my meager iTunes song list (I hardly ever tune in and cannot even remember why I loaded these)… 1 Destroyer The Kinks 2 Girls Got Rhythm ACDC 3 Polythene Pam The Beatles 4 Pure And Easy The Who 5 Love […]
- 2003
- LOP: Learning Objects Portal From Seneca College in Ontario, Canada comes a new Learning Objects Portal Page: ….a gateway to many resources about learning objects and repositories. We invite you to meander through the portal sections below based on your interest. f you like to discover through interaction, we suggest you visit our “Activities” section… This site is intended […]
- X Marks the (Jade) Spot It is in the building… not only that, it is on my desk. “It” is a brand new Apple XServe, and soon will be home to all of our MT blogs as well as hosting some experimental eportfolio services as well. “It” is a 1.3 GHz screamer replacing an old 500 MHz PIII currently hosting […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 12 posts previously published on December 8th
- 2024
- Roll Your Own Mastodon Starter Kits It looks like there is a crowd rush to jump from The Platform I will Only Ever Call Twitter to Bluesky. Huge numbers. Much because there is no learning curve. It looks and feels like Twitter not so olde. But also, folks are finding the just add water to the instant mix of the Bluesky […] ➡
- 2019
- A Big SPLOTbox Full of a Lotta of Little Features BBFWLLT is a family joke/story. When my Mom asked what I wanted for a gift (singular), my little kid brain produced a clever strategy to get more out of the deal. I would ask for a “Big Box Full of a Whole Lotta Little Toys.” This feels like the perfect metaphor for the latest version […] ➡
- 2016
- 2014
- And There is Nixon and Elvis Oh Google, what you do with my keywords. Unexpected images, then leading me down some memories. It’s mostly connected in loose strands of unexpected fibers. So I am working on an icon for a new secret half formed thing Brian Lamb and I are cooking up here at TRU. The metaphor is somewhat in the […] ➡
- 2013
- Daily Create Remix of a Remix of a … As an experiment, the last 4 ds106 Daily Creates have been designed hatched to be ones where each builds off of the last. I did this partly to see if such a thing would work, but maybe also as a repeatable activity in doing remixes where the participants build off of each other’s work. The […] ➡
- 2012
- My God, It’s Full of Stories cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by entrelec No one denies the power of story. We are wired for storytelling. It’s the world’s oldest tradition. It’s what makes us human. It matters for game designers. It produces results in business. People who market brands and specialize in SEO are storytellers. And […] ➡
- 2009
- Ford Wave cc licensed flickr photo shared by gamp Taking a page from Google, there is new announcement from the automobile industry: BillyBob and Melba Bootwaddle, the original creators of the reverse flow corn cob floating ball carburetor, will take the stage to unveil their latest project, Ford Wave. As BillyBob describes it, “Knowing what we do […] ➡
- 2006
- Autograph My Mouse, Please… Just got back home from a tremendous 2 days of NMC meetings (wow, I never thought “tremendous” went with “meetings” but ours are) where I was able to check off one of my 43 people… the legendary Doug Engelbart. And of course the reflex association goes to “yeah, he’s the guy that invented the mouse…” […] ➡
- 2005
- MCLI iForum Released We announced to Maricopa today the availability of our MCLI iForum at http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/iforum/ This is the first online version of the print publication we’ve run for many years. This is all built in WordPress. Our hope for upcoming issues is to have people submit drafts remotely, but with a time press, we had folks send […] ➡
- 2004
- My Not So Greatest Playlist Meme of ’04 Just following the cue of Señor D’Arcy, here is what popped of the shuffling of my meager iTunes song list (I hardly ever tune in and cannot even remember why I loaded these)… 1 Destroyer The Kinks 2 Girls Got Rhythm ACDC 3 Polythene Pam The Beatles 4 Pure And Easy The Who 5 Love […] ➡
- 2003
- LOP: Learning Objects Portal From Seneca College in Ontario, Canada comes a new Learning Objects Portal Page: ….a gateway to many resources about learning objects and repositories. We invite you to meander through the portal sections below based on your interest. f you like to discover through interaction, we suggest you visit our “Activities” section… This site is intended […] ➡
- X Marks the (Jade) Spot It is in the building… not only that, it is on my desk. “It” is a brand new Apple XServe, and soon will be home to all of our MT blogs as well as hosting some experimental eportfolio services as well. “It” is a 1.3 GHz screamer replacing an old 500 MHz PIII currently hosting […] ➡
// 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.
