“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 September 10th
- 2018
- The Pechaflickr Goes On and On (even if the twitter widget does not) I probably said elsewhere that something else I made online was my favorite thing, but today I am going to say it’s the pechaflickr site I made that combines random images from flickr with pechakucha. Even trying to describe it in words does not help, give it a spin. It’s built all from open pieces […]
- 2015
- Redoing the Syndication Machine for Project Community 2015 This year is the fourth iteration of a course in the Netherlands that I support remotely with Nancy White. Offered at the Hague University of Applied Sciences in the Industrial Design Engineering (IDE) program: Project Community is a project, a community and a set of tools for using online communities and networks for enhancing the […]
- 2013
- What I Learned from a Gung Ho Bike Mechanic- Be Memorable cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine My summer project of getting back into mountain biking has been crammed into late August and September. I bought that Schwinn Moab in 1999 to use when I lived in Phoenix to do off road bicycle commuting. It sat for 2 years while […]
- Styling Down those Oversized Images in WordPress cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Reema This blog’s crusty old theme (I still like it, sue me) has a pretty narrow width content column, 500px fixed. I typically size my media to fit. Since I have been syndicating content into here from my other blogs– my Barking Dog photo […]
- 2012
- Yo Gilfus, I Got Yer Syndication Fix and covering up our questionable practices… It’s been a few days since I fanned the flames of how a big time edu consultant was republishing from other bloggers as their own. Its so easy to sweep your shit crap poop Numero 2 under the rug. It just smells a bit, but most people just walk […]
- 2008
- How to Put Anything in Your MediaWiki Pages Well, “anything” is loosely termed. I run about 6 different MediaWiki sites for the NMC, and I have to remind myself alot that the software is a huge black box (it works super) and I am pretty sure the things I have done tap maybe 8% of what it is capable of doing. One of […]
- CCK08- I Swear! A Behaviorist Dog Ate My Homework! Doh! I wrote this two days ago and forgot to click publish! n00b! It’s the first week of classes for the Connectivism and Connected Knowledge course and I am already lapsing behind. As a Massively Open Online Course, maybe I cna get lost in the crowd of 2000 gazillion students. Would you believe a dog […]
- 2007
- You Had Me at Dog I could barely ignore an appearance of a new site called Inside a Dog, a new site from Victoria, Australia aimed at promoting youth reading and interesting in writing and those lovely old fashioned portable content devices called “books”. But what a clever web theme (yes, I am biased)- that a program all the way […]
- 2003
- Sharable BlogLines Awesome, this is a step up in usefulness for Bloglinesthe online RSS aggregator. You can now make the collections of feeds you post on BlogLines public, and thus collections of feeds can be shared via a simple URL. Actually I had submitted this as a suggested feature when I looked at the site a few […]
- Hey (Hic)… this Merlot is tasting better… Okay, this dog is going to anger management. After our recent barking on Sipping MERLOT’s RSS Feeds: Is this Boone’s Farm or Dom Perignon?, we enjoyed some good discussion with some MERLOT insiders. The bottom line is that MERLOT still has a fabulous wealth of intstructional resources, and should be on the Bookmark list of […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 10 posts previously published on September 10th
- 2018
- 2015
- Redoing the Syndication Machine for Project Community 2015 This year is the fourth iteration of a course in the Netherlands that I support remotely with Nancy White. Offered at the Hague University of Applied Sciences in the Industrial Design Engineering (IDE) program: Project Community is a project, a community and a set of tools for using online communities and networks for enhancing the […] ➡
- 2013
- What I Learned from a Gung Ho Bike Mechanic- Be Memorable cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine My summer project of getting back into mountain biking has been crammed into late August and September. I bought that Schwinn Moab in 1999 to use when I lived in Phoenix to do off road bicycle commuting. It sat for 2 years while […] ➡
- Styling Down those Oversized Images in WordPress cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Reema This blog’s crusty old theme (I still like it, sue me) has a pretty narrow width content column, 500px fixed. I typically size my media to fit. Since I have been syndicating content into here from my other blogs– my Barking Dog photo […] ➡
- 2012
- Yo Gilfus, I Got Yer Syndication Fix and covering up our questionable practices… It’s been a few days since I fanned the flames of how a big time edu consultant was republishing from other bloggers as their own. Its so easy to sweep your shit crap poop Numero 2 under the rug. It just smells a bit, but most people just walk […] ➡
- 2008
- How to Put Anything in Your MediaWiki Pages Well, “anything” is loosely termed. I run about 6 different MediaWiki sites for the NMC, and I have to remind myself alot that the software is a huge black box (it works super) and I am pretty sure the things I have done tap maybe 8% of what it is capable of doing. One of […] ➡
- CCK08- I Swear! A Behaviorist Dog Ate My Homework! Doh! I wrote this two days ago and forgot to click publish! n00b! It’s the first week of classes for the Connectivism and Connected Knowledge course and I am already lapsing behind. As a Massively Open Online Course, maybe I cna get lost in the crowd of 2000 gazillion students. Would you believe a dog […] ➡
- 2007
- You Had Me at Dog I could barely ignore an appearance of a new site called Inside a Dog, a new site from Victoria, Australia aimed at promoting youth reading and interesting in writing and those lovely old fashioned portable content devices called “books”. But what a clever web theme (yes, I am biased)- that a program all the way […] ➡
- 2003
- Sharable BlogLines Awesome, this is a step up in usefulness for Bloglinesthe online RSS aggregator. You can now make the collections of feeds you post on BlogLines public, and thus collections of feeds can be shared via a simple URL. Actually I had submitted this as a suggested feature when I looked at the site a few […] ➡
- Hey (Hic)… this Merlot is tasting better… Okay, this dog is going to anger management. After our recent barking on Sipping MERLOT’s RSS Feeds: Is this Boone’s Farm or Dom Perignon?, we enjoyed some good discussion with some MERLOT insiders. The bottom line is that MERLOT still has a fabulous wealth of intstructional resources, and should be on the Bookmark list of […] ➡
// 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.
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