“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 August 20th
- 2018
- Stick This Podcast on the Refrigerator Door Better than getting an A on the geometry test, it’s more exciting to use a magnet to attach Episode 218 of the Teaching in Higher Education podcast to the front of my fridge. I was excited when Bonni Stachowiak DM’ed me asking to record a session. I’ve seen a number of folks I know get […]
- 2017
- Flickr: 76,000+ CC0 Photos Shared Share this barking on social media
- I am Apple 2017 has been a good year for my apple tree. The harvest here in north central Arizona is never predictable, mostly the mature tree off the corner of my deck produces fruit every other year. Last year was a bust, only ten fruit on one branch. I’d like to think the full limbs this year, […]
- 2016
- Neighbor Lines I bought this little house in Strawberry, Arizona, in 2002 with my then wife as a vacation home when we lived in Scottsdale. Even now, as it was then, it’s staggering to think of the adult responsible idea of owning two homes. I’m sure it was one of our early trips up here, working outside […]
- 2013
- Building the RMOOC Site, Syndication and All Brace yourself for another 10 mile long blog post; much like the recent one on the Harvard Future of Learning site, this one focusses on another syndication driven wordpress site. Brian Lamb approached me in mid June about working on this project, and coming on the heels of the Harvard one, I was able to […]
- 2012
- Potcerting Time will tell (very soon) whether my string of Signing Up for Open Courses and Bailing Early (ahem PLENK10, Coursera, Code Academy, MOOCMOOC) continues. I’m hoping to change that with Pedagogy First! Program for Online Teaching’s 2012-2013 Certificate Program: This online open class from Miracosta College is led by people I totally adore and respect, […]
- Meet Rachel… Anne…Tiffany… from Card Holder Services Despite years of reporting this to DoNotCall, requesting help from my Congressional Representative, reading stories that these robo call spammers were stopped, it continues- why can’t the NAS and FBI spend some of their effort pursuing these law breakers instead of spying on citizens? Notes continue to be added at the end of this post. […]
- 2008
- “I Can’t” is a Self Fulfilling Prophecy Jen starts out a post on Fire in the Kitchen with a statement, “I Can’t Cook”– she follows a nice thought path of using that as a metaphor for her ideas (and frustrations) on what she sees (I think) as an overemphasis on the tools of Web 2.0 and a frustration at one size fits […]
- This Dog Wags for A Calico flickr cc image credit: Cats and Dogs, Living Together! by kmevans In my photography I’ve had a slight passing interest this year in creating panorama images (flickr has evidence). Since discovering my little Canon SD800 has a panorama shooting mode – it presents a screen with overlap to help with aligning when taking a series […]
- Going To Mobile During Exams? Yes for One Australia School photo credit: Mr.Tea It’s 6am here and after prepping once cup of fresh coffee, I flip the laptop open to check the weather… and next thing you know am getting pinged in Australia from my colleagues in Australia. Stephan, Robyn, and Alex want to talk about a breaking story there in the Sydney Morning Herald, […]
- 2006
- We Can All Be Radio Stations … though it may not be the best of ideas. As described a few barks back, in my work at NMC we’ve been exploring some audio technologies, primarily to bring live audio into our Second Life Campus. Because the audio channel in SecondLife that is tied to the “land” needs to be an MP3 url, […]
- 2003
- #$!@ Blog Spammers It’s been bad enough delting the email crud generated by the latest virus, but today I got my first porn content inserted into a comment on this weblog, with links to just about everything possible you could imagine being enlarged, shrunk, photographed, made money on, etc. So if you exercise IP banning on your blogs […]
- live blog updates: the World as a Blog Wow, a variation on the BlogChatter, this nifty site shows, in near real-time, the World as a Blog… Real time and updating display of weblog postings, around the world… Weblogs.com + geocoding + RSS But what is it? You see a world map, and as weblogs entries are posted around the world, they appear on […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 13 posts previously published on August 20th
- 2018
- Stick This Podcast on the Refrigerator Door Better than getting an A on the geometry test, it’s more exciting to use a magnet to attach Episode 218 of the Teaching in Higher Education podcast to the front of my fridge. I was excited when Bonni Stachowiak DM’ed me asking to record a session. I’ve seen a number of folks I know get […] ➡
- 2017
- Flickr: 76,000+ CC0 Photos Shared Share this barking on social media ➡
- I am Apple 2017 has been a good year for my apple tree. The harvest here in north central Arizona is never predictable, mostly the mature tree off the corner of my deck produces fruit every other year. Last year was a bust, only ten fruit on one branch. I’d like to think the full limbs this year, […] ➡
- 2016
- Neighbor Lines I bought this little house in Strawberry, Arizona, in 2002 with my then wife as a vacation home when we lived in Scottsdale. Even now, as it was then, it’s staggering to think of the adult responsible idea of owning two homes. I’m sure it was one of our early trips up here, working outside […] ➡
- 2013
- Building the RMOOC Site, Syndication and All Brace yourself for another 10 mile long blog post; much like the recent one on the Harvard Future of Learning site, this one focusses on another syndication driven wordpress site. Brian Lamb approached me in mid June about working on this project, and coming on the heels of the Harvard one, I was able to […] ➡
- 2012
- Potcerting Time will tell (very soon) whether my string of Signing Up for Open Courses and Bailing Early (ahem PLENK10, Coursera, Code Academy, MOOCMOOC) continues. I’m hoping to change that with Pedagogy First! Program for Online Teaching’s 2012-2013 Certificate Program: This online open class from Miracosta College is led by people I totally adore and respect, […] ➡
- Meet Rachel… Anne…Tiffany… from Card Holder Services Despite years of reporting this to DoNotCall, requesting help from my Congressional Representative, reading stories that these robo call spammers were stopped, it continues- why can’t the NAS and FBI spend some of their effort pursuing these law breakers instead of spying on citizens? Notes continue to be added at the end of this post. […] ➡
- 2008
- “I Can’t” is a Self Fulfilling Prophecy Jen starts out a post on Fire in the Kitchen with a statement, “I Can’t Cook”– she follows a nice thought path of using that as a metaphor for her ideas (and frustrations) on what she sees (I think) as an overemphasis on the tools of Web 2.0 and a frustration at one size fits […] ➡
- This Dog Wags for A Calico flickr cc image credit: Cats and Dogs, Living Together! by kmevans In my photography I’ve had a slight passing interest this year in creating panorama images (flickr has evidence). Since discovering my little Canon SD800 has a panorama shooting mode – it presents a screen with overlap to help with aligning when taking a series […] ➡
- Going To Mobile During Exams? Yes for One Australia School photo credit: Mr.Tea It’s 6am here and after prepping once cup of fresh coffee, I flip the laptop open to check the weather… and next thing you know am getting pinged in Australia from my colleagues in Australia. Stephan, Robyn, and Alex want to talk about a breaking story there in the Sydney Morning Herald, […] ➡
- 2006
- We Can All Be Radio Stations … though it may not be the best of ideas. As described a few barks back, in my work at NMC we’ve been exploring some audio technologies, primarily to bring live audio into our Second Life Campus. Because the audio channel in SecondLife that is tied to the “land” needs to be an MP3 url, […] ➡
- 2003
- #$!@ Blog Spammers It’s been bad enough delting the email crud generated by the latest virus, but today I got my first porn content inserted into a comment on this weblog, with links to just about everything possible you could imagine being enlarged, shrunk, photographed, made money on, etc. So if you exercise IP banning on your blogs […] ➡
- live blog updates: the World as a Blog Wow, a variation on the BlogChatter, this nifty site shows, in near real-time, the World as a Blog… Real time and updating display of weblog postings, around the world… Weblogs.com + geocoding + RSS But what is it? You see a world map, and as weblogs entries are posted around the world, they appear on […] ➡
// 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.
Share this barking on social media
