“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 12 posts previously published on July 7th
- 2016
- Little Web Inspector / CSS Tricks Often in my web work, I need to extract a logo or element from another web site. The old right/control click does not work if the image is set by a more elaborate CSS extension (e.g. the background image for a header). Today I used a trick I know I have done before, but hey, […]
- What do you mean “If” Facebook were a country? Is a country merely constituted by a census of number of supposed inhabitants? It memes so. Via, I believe a recommendation on YouTube (based upon algorithms that absorb my activities), last night I watched the english translation of the documentary Facebookistan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCyO5uT9XfU In this country, there are people who delete their content, but on request […]
- 2015
- The Manzanita Kink The day I took this photo I spent most of it working on a project, and by late afternoon I realized I had not taken any photos yet. To maintain a daily photo habit, you have to sometimes find opportunity quickly. This is one of the manzanita shrubs (common in Arizona, small cousins of the […]
- 2014
- Picture This Today I had the opportunity to open the Arizona K12 Center’s Ninth Camp Plug and Play in Tucson. About I year ago, I sort of “crashed” their mobile learning conference here– I came down to visit colleagues Dean Shareski and Wes Fryer. Shortly after I got a super nice email from Tony Vincent, leading to […]
- 2013
- ds106 Daily Create Challenge (7): The Same Neat/Messy Room cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Today’s ds106 Daily Create is another photo challenge – “Make a photo pairing of your neatest and messiest spaces” These are both images of my spare bedroom/office. I keep one side neat for guests, but the desk is my clutter space of tech […]
- ds106 Daily Create Challenge (6): Spike I Am cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Six days in the July 2013 Daily Create Challange, 6 done. The challenge is simple- try to do as many Daily Creates as you can. No shame or MOOC dropout apologies if you don;t do the am all. The only apologies to be […]
- 2011
- #4LIFE While traveling, I am missing out on most of the wild antics going on in ds106 where there appears to be hostile class takeovers, student revolts, and a lot of name tossing going on. It’s no wonder what the MOOC people hardly mention this class, as it fits no mold any online open course has […]
- 2010
- Tastes Like Beta: Delicious Browsing Did someone say beta? That really gets my attention when I see it, I just cannot resist a click of curiosity. I don’t know how long this has been on delicious.com, but I am ecstatic to see that the venerable social bookmarking site is still tinkering under the hood. So from what I see, this […]
- 2004
- Thinking, Writing About the Small Pieces (NMC 2004) Brian Alger has been doing some nice reflecting on the concepts of our NMC 2004 “Small Piecess Loosely Joined” idea- recently writing about “Weblogs: Which Pieces and How Should They Joined? (NMC 2004)”… I would have written, but Brian’s blog lacks a comment function (I find that a gaping large piece, but understand that people […]
- Survey/Quiz Tool inside ePortfolio (“Desert and a Floor Wax?”) Audree has been busy…. she is the developer of the ePortfolio tool built first at Chandler-Gilbert Community College and also running in our office as “Maricopa eP” for the rest of our system. Over the last few weeks, she has added new tools and features, based on faculty and student input, especially since at her […]
- quickSub: A Path Around the Pesky Little Bothersome XML Icon? Once again serendipity on stumbling intoquickSub – a little piece of CSS and JavaScript code to perhaps add some more usability to the RSS links? I agree mostly with others contentions on the problems with posting an or icon on a web page where the human followed link is a mess of inhuman XML. It […]
- Tiny Improvement for Feed2JS and New Site Features Just for fun, I added a rather small feature to the Feed2JS script/service; Curt Whittaker had emailed requesting: It would be nice if the script could have alternate text if there are no items in the current feed. For example, we are looking to use this for our Calendar of Events – see http://test.sou.edu. Some […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 12 posts previously published on July 7th
- 2016
- Little Web Inspector / CSS Tricks Often in my web work, I need to extract a logo or element from another web site. The old right/control click does not work if the image is set by a more elaborate CSS extension (e.g. the background image for a header). Today I used a trick I know I have done before, but hey, […] ➡
- What do you mean “If” Facebook were a country? Is a country merely constituted by a census of number of supposed inhabitants? It memes so. Via, I believe a recommendation on YouTube (based upon algorithms that absorb my activities), last night I watched the english translation of the documentary Facebookistan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCyO5uT9XfU In this country, there are people who delete their content, but on request […] ➡
- 2015
- The Manzanita Kink The day I took this photo I spent most of it working on a project, and by late afternoon I realized I had not taken any photos yet. To maintain a daily photo habit, you have to sometimes find opportunity quickly. This is one of the manzanita shrubs (common in Arizona, small cousins of the […] ➡
- 2014
- Picture This Today I had the opportunity to open the Arizona K12 Center’s Ninth Camp Plug and Play in Tucson. About I year ago, I sort of “crashed” their mobile learning conference here– I came down to visit colleagues Dean Shareski and Wes Fryer. Shortly after I got a super nice email from Tony Vincent, leading to […] ➡
- 2013
- ds106 Daily Create Challenge (7): The Same Neat/Messy Room cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Today’s ds106 Daily Create is another photo challenge – “Make a photo pairing of your neatest and messiest spaces” These are both images of my spare bedroom/office. I keep one side neat for guests, but the desk is my clutter space of tech […] ➡
- ds106 Daily Create Challenge (6): Spike I Am cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Six days in the July 2013 Daily Create Challange, 6 done. The challenge is simple- try to do as many Daily Creates as you can. No shame or MOOC dropout apologies if you don;t do the am all. The only apologies to be […] ➡
- 2011
- #4LIFE While traveling, I am missing out on most of the wild antics going on in ds106 where there appears to be hostile class takeovers, student revolts, and a lot of name tossing going on. It’s no wonder what the MOOC people hardly mention this class, as it fits no mold any online open course has […] ➡
- 2010
- Tastes Like Beta: Delicious Browsing Did someone say beta? That really gets my attention when I see it, I just cannot resist a click of curiosity. I don’t know how long this has been on delicious.com, but I am ecstatic to see that the venerable social bookmarking site is still tinkering under the hood. So from what I see, this […] ➡
- 2004
- Thinking, Writing About the Small Pieces (NMC 2004) Brian Alger has been doing some nice reflecting on the concepts of our NMC 2004 “Small Piecess Loosely Joined” idea- recently writing about “Weblogs: Which Pieces and How Should They Joined? (NMC 2004)”… I would have written, but Brian’s blog lacks a comment function (I find that a gaping large piece, but understand that people […] ➡
- Survey/Quiz Tool inside ePortfolio (“Desert and a Floor Wax?”) Audree has been busy…. she is the developer of the ePortfolio tool built first at Chandler-Gilbert Community College and also running in our office as “Maricopa eP” for the rest of our system. Over the last few weeks, she has added new tools and features, based on faculty and student input, especially since at her […] ➡
- quickSub: A Path Around the Pesky Little Bothersome XML Icon? Once again serendipity on stumbling intoquickSub – a little piece of CSS and JavaScript code to perhaps add some more usability to the RSS links? I agree mostly with others contentions on the problems with posting an or icon on a web page where the human followed link is a mess of inhuman XML. It […] ➡
- Tiny Improvement for Feed2JS and New Site Features Just for fun, I added a rather small feature to the Feed2JS script/service; Curt Whittaker had emailed requesting: It would be nice if the script could have alternate text if there are no items in the current feed. For example, we are looking to use this for our Calendar of Events – see http://test.sou.edu. Some […] ➡
// 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.
