“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 March 19th
- 2017
- A Silly CC IP-SUM Generator There’s something I love about web generators. Not the ones that make power, but ones that power the creation of stuff. The stuff of the useless web. Everything from the tombstones to metal band names to church signs to luchador names. Maybe it’s because people make them for no other reason than because they can. […]
- The Next Time I Have a Flash of an Idea and Rush Out to Buy a Domain… In 2013 the idea that was a domain first was twigit.info (not worth clicking, I let it go). I scraped in the bowels of my hosting account and found the remains of the holding page: I found some notes in a Google Doc and am a little curious I had a sub title of “a […]
- 2015
- Pushing at Dichotomies With a (Perhaps Questionable?) Twitter Performance Our reviews came in as “icky”. “Risky”. “Manipulative”. Hey, pleasing all the people all the time, not worth trying. Last Friday was my last act in Canada from a 4 month stint as an Open Learning Research Fellow at Thompson Rivers University. As a nice dessert to the experience, Brian Lamb and I were invited […]
- Time Traveling to 1996 for the TCC Conference Time travel is rather exciting, but it does where you out. Or maybe that was staying up until 3:30 am getting ready for a talk? I shall garner negative sympathy for doing a keynote in Hawaii, but when the invitation comes… take it. I’m totally honored to be in the poster with other luminaries for […]
- 2012
- 50+ Web 2.0 modi per raccontare una storia With one cut and paste, 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story is now available in 54 languages. You can do tis to any wikispaces site (or just about any other), but getting the code for the widget at http://translate.google.com/translate_tools. Copy this code! On a wikispaces site, simply click the link on your sidebar […]
- Recasting Movies as Premakes Along the lines of the ds106 Return to the Silent Era Assignment, this set of “Premakes” by YouTube user whoiseyevan offer a fascinating approach to recasting well known videos into mashups of movies that came before them. HInt for my students- this would make a great idea for a final project. The concept is called […]
- 2011
- Scary Stories from Strawberry #3 cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I grabbed the mic for 15 minutes tonight to read a few more tales from The Thing at the Foot of the Bed. It occurred to me that this book was a bit like going back to the elementary school you attended and noting how […]
- 2009
- What The World Needs Now… is another learning resource repository For some reason I’ve been having Cracker’s Teen Angst song in heavy iPod rotation; the lyrics are just ra ra (or is it la la la la). A new version might be: Cause, what the web needs now Is a new kind of resource collection. Cause people just cant do search location. Cause, what the […]
- Tag Juggling modified from cc licensed flickr image by espresso marco with tag cloud image from mediwiki I believe in tags. I love tags. After looking past at an excessive number of hash tags on twitter (and excessive ones in my flickr stream… and in my delicious account), I did start to wonder about the human capacity […]
- 2008
- Register Soon to Mash It Up With NMC photo credit: ekai Don’t miss out on the 2008 NMC Symposium on Mashups – early registration ends this Sunday. Stop reading (or at least skim), and register now. This is another one of the NMC’s online conferences, and to fit with the theme, we are even mashing up our venues between the 3D world of […]
- 2007
- Convergence Web Culture Video Conference Mashup We’re less than 2 days out from the NMC Spring 2007 Online Conference on the Convergence of Web Culture and Video, and an awesome array of sessions ins lining up quite nicely. Registration is still open and it gives you at least 60 days post conference access to all materials and archived Elluminate sessions. Yes, […]
- Tweet? The Twitter update WP plugin has not worked for months so was pleased to see that Alex King, veteran pluing author, has released Twitter Tools, that updates Twiiter when you post a new entry, but can also pull in your tweets to a Wp blog as a sidebar, and optionally publish a pile of your […]
- 2005
- Podcast Mania… And What is Missing It is no secret for us in instructional technology that podcasting is becoming the raging meme of excitement, a good thing. Maybe it is because of media attention, or just the whole iPod thing is just too cool. I’ve heard it uttered much more recently in emails and conversation with faculty in our system, and […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 13 posts previously published on March 19th
- 2017
- A Silly CC IP-SUM Generator There’s something I love about web generators. Not the ones that make power, but ones that power the creation of stuff. The stuff of the useless web. Everything from the tombstones to metal band names to church signs to luchador names. Maybe it’s because people make them for no other reason than because they can. […] ➡
- The Next Time I Have a Flash of an Idea and Rush Out to Buy a Domain… In 2013 the idea that was a domain first was twigit.info (not worth clicking, I let it go). I scraped in the bowels of my hosting account and found the remains of the holding page: I found some notes in a Google Doc and am a little curious I had a sub title of “a […] ➡
- 2015
- Pushing at Dichotomies With a (Perhaps Questionable?) Twitter Performance Our reviews came in as “icky”. “Risky”. “Manipulative”. Hey, pleasing all the people all the time, not worth trying. Last Friday was my last act in Canada from a 4 month stint as an Open Learning Research Fellow at Thompson Rivers University. As a nice dessert to the experience, Brian Lamb and I were invited […] ➡
- Time Traveling to 1996 for the TCC Conference Time travel is rather exciting, but it does where you out. Or maybe that was staying up until 3:30 am getting ready for a talk? I shall garner negative sympathy for doing a keynote in Hawaii, but when the invitation comes… take it. I’m totally honored to be in the poster with other luminaries for […] ➡
- 2012
- 50+ Web 2.0 modi per raccontare una storia With one cut and paste, 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story is now available in 54 languages. You can do tis to any wikispaces site (or just about any other), but getting the code for the widget at http://translate.google.com/translate_tools. Copy this code! On a wikispaces site, simply click the link on your sidebar […] ➡
- Recasting Movies as Premakes Along the lines of the ds106 Return to the Silent Era Assignment, this set of “Premakes” by YouTube user whoiseyevan offer a fascinating approach to recasting well known videos into mashups of movies that came before them. HInt for my students- this would make a great idea for a final project. The concept is called […] ➡
- 2011
- Scary Stories from Strawberry #3 cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I grabbed the mic for 15 minutes tonight to read a few more tales from The Thing at the Foot of the Bed. It occurred to me that this book was a bit like going back to the elementary school you attended and noting how […] ➡
- 2009
- What The World Needs Now… is another learning resource repository For some reason I’ve been having Cracker’s Teen Angst song in heavy iPod rotation; the lyrics are just ra ra (or is it la la la la). A new version might be: Cause, what the web needs now Is a new kind of resource collection. Cause people just cant do search location. Cause, what the […] ➡
- Tag Juggling modified from cc licensed flickr image by espresso marco with tag cloud image from mediwiki I believe in tags. I love tags. After looking past at an excessive number of hash tags on twitter (and excessive ones in my flickr stream… and in my delicious account), I did start to wonder about the human capacity […] ➡
- 2008
- Register Soon to Mash It Up With NMC photo credit: ekai Don’t miss out on the 2008 NMC Symposium on Mashups – early registration ends this Sunday. Stop reading (or at least skim), and register now. This is another one of the NMC’s online conferences, and to fit with the theme, we are even mashing up our venues between the 3D world of […] ➡
- 2007
- Convergence Web Culture Video Conference Mashup We’re less than 2 days out from the NMC Spring 2007 Online Conference on the Convergence of Web Culture and Video, and an awesome array of sessions ins lining up quite nicely. Registration is still open and it gives you at least 60 days post conference access to all materials and archived Elluminate sessions. Yes, […] ➡
- Tweet? The Twitter update WP plugin has not worked for months so was pleased to see that Alex King, veteran pluing author, has released Twitter Tools, that updates Twiiter when you post a new entry, but can also pull in your tweets to a Wp blog as a sidebar, and optionally publish a pile of your […] ➡
- 2005
- Podcast Mania… And What is Missing It is no secret for us in instructional technology that podcasting is becoming the raging meme of excitement, a good thing. Maybe it is because of media attention, or just the whole iPod thing is just too cool. I’ve heard it uttered much more recently in emails and conversation with faculty in our system, and […] ➡
// 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.
