“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 10 posts previously published on February 24th
- 2016
- Inside the (Weird) World of Facebook Catfishing (Part Deux With More Shame) (warning: a summary of today’s presentation descends into a detailed accounting of the flaws of facebook’s violation of its own community guidelines and rules on accounts, and ends with me dropping f-bombs) Today I was asked to do a second presentation for Sagrado students on catfishing, following the one I did February 10. While much […]
- 2015
- A Charmed T-Shirt On my 2013 visit to Hong Kong, my friend Nick and his wife Kelly took me on a trip to this place called Stanley. When we were going through the market, Kelly picked out a shirt for me; she said […]
- 2013
- World in a StoryBox / StoryBox in the World The StoryBox has been sitting for a few months in my closet. All alone. But it is about to go on a big trip with me starting Friday, and I am revving it up for a brand new round of media collection. I’ve not yet put out the details on this, and many of them […]
- 2011
- I Have a Hat for Yahoo cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I know zero about business, but in some alternate universe where I was teaching a course in business practices, there is an entire syllabus full of materials from Yahoo on how not to be successful. Look at their portfolio of successes with acquisitions, as painfully […]
- 2010
- Thanks Dailyshoot! cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog @dailyshoot: 2010/02/24: There is often a conflict between traditional and contemporary. Make a photo that shows this tension. (@melhutch) #ds101 Oh man, when I read the assignment this morning, I thought– "is this the first one I bail on?" — I had no clue what to do; I […]
- 2009
- Presentation Bar Props 2009/365/55: Presenter/Bar View by cogdogblog posted 24 Feb ’09, 9.43pm MST PST on flickr The topic of the presentation I did today for the EDUCAUSE Southwest Regional Conference with Susan Zvacek (University of Kansas) was Balancing Acts: Making IT Work for Everyone. We took an alt presentation route to present this via a three act […]
- 2008
- The Moose Has Left The Building Such a high was the 2008 Northern Voice Conference and how quickly it seems gone. By far, this surpasses by experience her two years ago, my first Moose ride. Its as much for the gathering of creative people that seem to be everywhere in Vancouver, the low overhead personal way a conference is organized (as […]
- Reverend Jim Belts the EduGlu Blues EduBloggers JamFest – 55 by D’Arcy Norman posted 24 Feb ’08, 1.33am MST PST on flickr In celebration of the high watermark of Northern Voice, the music was rocking from Brian’s house… with the sounds of Reverend Jim singing about “Got to get some Edugluuuuuuuuuuu.” It was crazy and unrecorded, had to be there. What […]
- 2006
- About in Austin flickr foto Capitol Gated 2available on my flickr I am here for a first time visit, to Austin, Texas, for the New Media Consortium (NMC) Directors meeting a one day plus dinner gathering of a number of brilliant and creative reps from various new media centers across the US. I just love so much hanging […]
- 2005
- The Grand VideoCasting Future: Watching Me Say Ummm With podcasting going from zero to tech trend in 6 months, some are hedging bets that videocasting is already accelerating. So here is the CogDogBlog evolution. We go from reading my typos in a blog to listening to me say “ummm” as a podcast to watching me say “ummm” as a videocast to a 3D […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 10 posts previously published on February 24th
- 2016
- 2015
- A Charmed T-Shirt On my 2013 visit to Hong Kong, my friend Nick and his wife Kelly took me on a trip to this place called Stanley. When we were going through the market, Kelly picked out a shirt for me; she said […] ➡
- 2013
- World in a StoryBox / StoryBox in the World The StoryBox has been sitting for a few months in my closet. All alone. But it is about to go on a big trip with me starting Friday, and I am revving it up for a brand new round of media collection. I’ve not yet put out the details on this, and many of them […] ➡
- 2011
- I Have a Hat for Yahoo cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I know zero about business, but in some alternate universe where I was teaching a course in business practices, there is an entire syllabus full of materials from Yahoo on how not to be successful. Look at their portfolio of successes with acquisitions, as painfully […] ➡
- 2010
- Thanks Dailyshoot! cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog @dailyshoot: 2010/02/24: There is often a conflict between traditional and contemporary. Make a photo that shows this tension. (@melhutch) #ds101 Oh man, when I read the assignment this morning, I thought– "is this the first one I bail on?" — I had no clue what to do; I […] ➡
- 2009
- Presentation Bar Props 2009/365/55: Presenter/Bar View by cogdogblog posted 24 Feb ’09, 9.43pm MST PST on flickr The topic of the presentation I did today for the EDUCAUSE Southwest Regional Conference with Susan Zvacek (University of Kansas) was Balancing Acts: Making IT Work for Everyone. We took an alt presentation route to present this via a three act […] ➡
- 2008
- The Moose Has Left The Building Such a high was the 2008 Northern Voice Conference and how quickly it seems gone. By far, this surpasses by experience her two years ago, my first Moose ride. Its as much for the gathering of creative people that seem to be everywhere in Vancouver, the low overhead personal way a conference is organized (as […] ➡
- Reverend Jim Belts the EduGlu Blues EduBloggers JamFest – 55 by D’Arcy Norman posted 24 Feb ’08, 1.33am MST PST on flickr In celebration of the high watermark of Northern Voice, the music was rocking from Brian’s house… with the sounds of Reverend Jim singing about “Got to get some Edugluuuuuuuuuuu.” It was crazy and unrecorded, had to be there. What […] ➡
- 2006
- About in Austin flickr foto Capitol Gated 2available on my flickr I am here for a first time visit, to Austin, Texas, for the New Media Consortium (NMC) Directors meeting a one day plus dinner gathering of a number of brilliant and creative reps from various new media centers across the US. I just love so much hanging […] ➡
- 2005
- The Grand VideoCasting Future: Watching Me Say Ummm With podcasting going from zero to tech trend in 6 months, some are hedging bets that videocasting is already accelerating. So here is the CogDogBlog evolution. We go from reading my typos in a blog to listening to me say “ummm” as a podcast to watching me say “ummm” as a videocast to a 3D […] ➡
// 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.
