“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 18th
- 2022
- Like Zombies, After 10 Years, the 60000 Times Myth Will Not Die It is so truthy that authors, so-called experts, and every day citizens just repeat this one because it sounds true. Thanks to blog commenter Ashraf another stumbling zombie was spotted at a niche publication called Inc, the moldy monster summoned to support a case for AI (stress the artificial portion and discard the Intelligence one)– […]
- 2018
- Gertrude Hammer’s Signature The memory is dim, like the fuzzy signal of an old analog TV set. The kind you would try and rotate the antenna to get it clear. I’m maybe 5? 7? and enter the Baltimore apartment of a close friend of my grandmother. This friend of hers is short for an adult and speaks a […]
- 2014
- Stalking the Mythical OER Reuse: Seeking Non Blurry Videos OERs. People build them. People house them in repositories. People do journal articles, conference presentations, research on them. I doubt never their existence. But the ultimate thing they are supposed to support, maybe their raison d’être– the re use by other educators, what do we have to show for that except whispered stories, innuendo, and […]
- Google Licensed For Reuse Image Search: Not All is As it Seems creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-ND ) flickr photo shared by capitphil I am searching for images almost every day for blog posts, media projects; always seeking the ones licensed for re-use. I spent some time recently building a Mozilla Teaching Kit for this practice. My go to tool is usually Compfight to search the creative […]
- 2013
- 2012
- The Seven Day Daily Create Mashup Challenge Okay, you creative wanna be privates! Many of you got down and followed the drill for a week of doing Daily Create assignments every day. THAT IS AMAZING. I did not think you had it in you. BUT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DONE?? YOU ARE NOT DONE YET! NOW YOU HAVE TO MAKE A […]
- Day 7: Illustrate Attraction I like you, You like me. Let’s make a photo. The last Daily Create of the Seven Day Challenge is to make a photo that illustrates the idea of attraction (this is one we borrowed from our inspiration, the Daily Shoot.) Alas, our crew has dwindled to 15, do you seek more abuse? I will […]
- 2008
- Traffic Help Us Americans Appreciate the Traffic Help by cogdogblog posted 18 Jul ’08, 1.18am MDT PST on flickr Look Right! There is a car! Even after 2 weeks in Australia, I remain confused at traffic crossings- yesterday I cam oh so close to stepping in front of a fast moving bus. The horn blew and there […]
- 2007
- 2006
- Still Head Scracthing at Technorati I still cock my head sideways, stare at Technorati, and wonder, just what the bleep does it do? Watching this blog’s ego feed, weeks went by and none of the “new” lights came up in my RSS reader. Then, some start dribbling in, but a few links are ones I had seen weeks ago, and […]
- 2005
- Hey MLX Spammer Some hapless two-bit kiddie spam roach has been spamming an old Maricopa Learning eXchange comments script (it should have been yanked long ago, that is my own hapless two-bit error)– it did not do anything but send out false notifications to the faculty in our system who have shared their ideas/projects in the MLX, and […]
- Ten Top Tip Teachers and Trainers.. (and fun graphics) I lost track of how many tangential clicks off what I set out to do on the web this morning, but cannot help but admire, and absorb more deeply Ten Tips for New Trainers/Teachers: Just because you’ve used lots of software doesn’t mean you can write code. Just because you’ve been in lots of buildings […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 12 posts previously published on July 18th
- 2022
- Like Zombies, After 10 Years, the 60000 Times Myth Will Not Die It is so truthy that authors, so-called experts, and every day citizens just repeat this one because it sounds true. Thanks to blog commenter Ashraf another stumbling zombie was spotted at a niche publication called Inc, the moldy monster summoned to support a case for AI (stress the artificial portion and discard the Intelligence one)– […] ➡
- 2018
- Gertrude Hammer’s Signature The memory is dim, like the fuzzy signal of an old analog TV set. The kind you would try and rotate the antenna to get it clear. I’m maybe 5? 7? and enter the Baltimore apartment of a close friend of my grandmother. This friend of hers is short for an adult and speaks a […] ➡
- 2014
- Stalking the Mythical OER Reuse: Seeking Non Blurry Videos OERs. People build them. People house them in repositories. People do journal articles, conference presentations, research on them. I doubt never their existence. But the ultimate thing they are supposed to support, maybe their raison d’être– the re use by other educators, what do we have to show for that except whispered stories, innuendo, and […] ➡
- Google Licensed For Reuse Image Search: Not All is As it Seems creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-ND ) flickr photo shared by capitphil I am searching for images almost every day for blog posts, media projects; always seeking the ones licensed for re-use. I spent some time recently building a Mozilla Teaching Kit for this practice. My go to tool is usually Compfight to search the creative […] ➡
- 2013
- 2012
- The Seven Day Daily Create Mashup Challenge Okay, you creative wanna be privates! Many of you got down and followed the drill for a week of doing Daily Create assignments every day. THAT IS AMAZING. I did not think you had it in you. BUT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DONE?? YOU ARE NOT DONE YET! NOW YOU HAVE TO MAKE A […] ➡
- Day 7: Illustrate Attraction I like you, You like me. Let’s make a photo. The last Daily Create of the Seven Day Challenge is to make a photo that illustrates the idea of attraction (this is one we borrowed from our inspiration, the Daily Shoot.) Alas, our crew has dwindled to 15, do you seek more abuse? I will […] ➡
- 2008
- Traffic Help Us Americans Appreciate the Traffic Help by cogdogblog posted 18 Jul ’08, 1.18am MDT PST on flickr Look Right! There is a car! Even after 2 weeks in Australia, I remain confused at traffic crossings- yesterday I cam oh so close to stepping in front of a fast moving bus. The horn blew and there […] ➡
- 2007
- 2006
- Still Head Scracthing at Technorati I still cock my head sideways, stare at Technorati, and wonder, just what the bleep does it do? Watching this blog’s ego feed, weeks went by and none of the “new” lights came up in my RSS reader. Then, some start dribbling in, but a few links are ones I had seen weeks ago, and […] ➡
- 2005
- Hey MLX Spammer Some hapless two-bit kiddie spam roach has been spamming an old Maricopa Learning eXchange comments script (it should have been yanked long ago, that is my own hapless two-bit error)– it did not do anything but send out false notifications to the faculty in our system who have shared their ideas/projects in the MLX, and […] ➡
- Ten Top Tip Teachers and Trainers.. (and fun graphics) I lost track of how many tangential clicks off what I set out to do on the web this morning, but cannot help but admire, and absorb more deeply Ten Tips for New Trainers/Teachers: Just because you’ve used lots of software doesn’t mean you can write code. Just because you’ve been in lots of buildings […] ➡
// 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.
