“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 14 posts previously published on April 9th
- 2019
- Permanent Stay You can now tag me #AlmostCanadian. About 10 months since crossing the fenceless, welcoming border into Canada to live with, love, and marry Cori, the government has said I can stay. Yesterday, a typical Big Blue Saskatchewan Open Sky Day, we drove to Saskatoon for the final interview to get my permanent resident card. We […]
- 2014
- David’s Chair, Empty Now for 27 Years cc licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog An actual lifetime ago, April 1987, I was perhaps likely forward to an upcoming 24th birthday but also the trip that summer that would pack up my east coast life for transplanting in Arizona. But on this day, I got word my brother passed away. […]
- 2013
- TCC 2013 Promo Reel: The ds106 Show A special edition of the ds106 show (the weekly live broadcast all about Digital Storytelling and ds106) takes place Tuesday, April 16 as a keynote session for the 2013 TCC Online Conference. The folks down in the basement have been working feverishly to produce the new promo spot for this sessions: This is pretty much […]
- 2012
- The ds106 Remix Machine cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by freshwater2006 Tonight we unleashed a new piece of the ds106 fleet of sites- the Assignment Remix Generator. This is an idea that was spawned by Tom Woodward way back in December 2010 as a way of instigating remixes of creative work by the playing of […]
- Gone 25 Today is the 25th year since my older brother passed away, at that he had been alive 34 years, and I knew him not even for that long. I’ve not known him besides dim memories, black and white photos, I can only grasp at; in some alternate universe he is my 59 year old brother […]
- Week 12: Remixing ds106 Assignments cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Viktor Hertz In the video section of the course we have already entered into the fray of video remixes and discussed abut the notion of everything as a remix. For this week, we are going to experiment with a new appliance in the ds106 […]
- Funky Traffic is Better than Traffic Funk It’s not quite the ds106 Speed Up Your Work Day assignment since I only grabbed 1 minute of video, but it was fun to play with speed up effects: I grabbed this from the Dedon Road overpass of I-95 during yesterday’s bike ride. It would have been better if I had propped the camera on […]
- 2010
- Dented Chrome cc licensed flickr photo shared by myoldpostcards It’s hard to stay shiny. A few weeks since moving to Chrome for my primary browsing, a few dents: Lack of Java. Not supported. Just means I have to launch Safari to sit in an Elluminate webinar. Very minor damage, just an annoyance. Irregular frame targeting. Some of […]
- 2009
- 2007
- Too Many Tweets Killing the Buddy My Twitter IM Buddy just keeled over again: Popularity has a high price. Share this barking on social media
- Houston: We Have a MediaWiki Docs Problem MediaWiki – love the app, hate the documentation, a term used loosely. Here is a normal set of steps it took to find the answer. What I was looking for was that special MediaWiki URl you need to use to edit the sidebar links of your site. Go to the bookmark I had for MediaWiki […]
- 2006
- Bookmarklet Tool Now in The Blog House As part of my transition, I have moved my Multibookmarklet Maker to the CogDogBlog domain. This was a tool I made back in January 2005, to allow one bookmarklet (browser bookmark tool) me able to be customized to allow posting to multiple web bookmark manager sites from one click, e.g. to add a given site […]
- A Weekend In Between Technically, this weekend, I was un-employed. Last week I was cleaning my office at Maricopa, digitizing old silly artifacts, tossing files, and trying to organize 14 years of web sites. Thursday, was an open house at our office, and I was overwhelmed by the people who paraded by to wish me well. And many gave […]
- 2004
- Shirt No Tie I should be working but… I cannot remember the last time I wore a tie. Somebody died or got married maybe 10 years ago. Another I used as a rag to clean a bike chain. But today for work, I was decked out in this spiffy, CDB official ware, courtesy of Mom. I doubt she […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 14 posts previously published on April 9th
- 2019
- Permanent Stay You can now tag me #AlmostCanadian. About 10 months since crossing the fenceless, welcoming border into Canada to live with, love, and marry Cori, the government has said I can stay. Yesterday, a typical Big Blue Saskatchewan Open Sky Day, we drove to Saskatoon for the final interview to get my permanent resident card. We […] ➡
- 2014
- David’s Chair, Empty Now for 27 Years cc licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog An actual lifetime ago, April 1987, I was perhaps likely forward to an upcoming 24th birthday but also the trip that summer that would pack up my east coast life for transplanting in Arizona. But on this day, I got word my brother passed away. […] ➡
- 2013
- TCC 2013 Promo Reel: The ds106 Show A special edition of the ds106 show (the weekly live broadcast all about Digital Storytelling and ds106) takes place Tuesday, April 16 as a keynote session for the 2013 TCC Online Conference. The folks down in the basement have been working feverishly to produce the new promo spot for this sessions: This is pretty much […] ➡
- 2012
- The ds106 Remix Machine cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by freshwater2006 Tonight we unleashed a new piece of the ds106 fleet of sites- the Assignment Remix Generator. This is an idea that was spawned by Tom Woodward way back in December 2010 as a way of instigating remixes of creative work by the playing of […] ➡
- Gone 25 Today is the 25th year since my older brother passed away, at that he had been alive 34 years, and I knew him not even for that long. I’ve not known him besides dim memories, black and white photos, I can only grasp at; in some alternate universe he is my 59 year old brother […] ➡
- Week 12: Remixing ds106 Assignments cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Viktor Hertz In the video section of the course we have already entered into the fray of video remixes and discussed abut the notion of everything as a remix. For this week, we are going to experiment with a new appliance in the ds106 […] ➡
- Funky Traffic is Better than Traffic Funk It’s not quite the ds106 Speed Up Your Work Day assignment since I only grabbed 1 minute of video, but it was fun to play with speed up effects: I grabbed this from the Dedon Road overpass of I-95 during yesterday’s bike ride. It would have been better if I had propped the camera on […] ➡
- 2010
- Dented Chrome cc licensed flickr photo shared by myoldpostcards It’s hard to stay shiny. A few weeks since moving to Chrome for my primary browsing, a few dents: Lack of Java. Not supported. Just means I have to launch Safari to sit in an Elluminate webinar. Very minor damage, just an annoyance. Irregular frame targeting. Some of […] ➡
- 2009
- 2007
- Too Many Tweets Killing the Buddy My Twitter IM Buddy just keeled over again: Popularity has a high price. Share this barking on social media ➡
- Houston: We Have a MediaWiki Docs Problem MediaWiki – love the app, hate the documentation, a term used loosely. Here is a normal set of steps it took to find the answer. What I was looking for was that special MediaWiki URl you need to use to edit the sidebar links of your site. Go to the bookmark I had for MediaWiki […] ➡
- 2006
- Bookmarklet Tool Now in The Blog House As part of my transition, I have moved my Multibookmarklet Maker to the CogDogBlog domain. This was a tool I made back in January 2005, to allow one bookmarklet (browser bookmark tool) me able to be customized to allow posting to multiple web bookmark manager sites from one click, e.g. to add a given site […] ➡
- A Weekend In Between Technically, this weekend, I was un-employed. Last week I was cleaning my office at Maricopa, digitizing old silly artifacts, tossing files, and trying to organize 14 years of web sites. Thursday, was an open house at our office, and I was overwhelmed by the people who paraded by to wish me well. And many gave […] ➡
- 2004
- Shirt No Tie I should be working but… I cannot remember the last time I wore a tie. Somebody died or got married maybe 10 years ago. Another I used as a rag to clean a bike chain. But today for work, I was decked out in this spiffy, CDB official ware, courtesy of Mom. I doubt she […] ➡
// 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.
