“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 11 posts previously published on September 13th
- 2018
- Nobody Makes It Easier to Install a WordPress Calling Card Site, NOBODY It’s rather exciting to finally see this available on my Reclaim Hosting cpanel… As if I need another reason to say how awesome @ReclaimHosting is- there is a second one click install of my WordPress calling Card themes available.This is way beyond "Hello World" in Twenty-Seventeen https://t.co/WOPKvEZOod pic.twitter.com/GDtuDunH2l— Alan Levine (@cogdog) September 11, 2018 One […]
- 2017
- That Cool Cool Cool Iris Wall In some ways, I do miss 2009. Working last month with David Porter, I was reminded of a thing I was playing with back then… David remembers it may be better than me! That’s when I was fooling around with this browser thing called Cool Iris 3D Wall for the first round of what then […]
- 2015
- If You Twitter Spam Me, I Will Mock Your T-Shirt Business Just for fun, published to medium… I Can’t Do Much About Internet Spam (But making fun of them makes me feel better) Top / Featured Image Credit: My Photoshop remix of an image spammed at me via twitter. In my book, spammers have no rights at all least of all rights to prevent me from […]
- 2012
- Balloon Boys While waiting for Michael Branson Smith’s video stream to start, I played with that groovy photo on his splash screen: Why can’t Matt hang on to his balloon? And what is MBS glancing at? A story ro be told… Done by some layering, clone brushing, and pixel painting eyeballs in Photoshop Share this barking on […]
- 2011
- Geology Like The Wolf cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Readers of this blog know my repeated use of the words “Amazing” and “Stories” — these are actually all around us, and there is nothing finer than when they come unexpectedly. Such was the case Monday. On my route from north of Baltimore to New […]
- 2009
- Missing Pie Pieces cc licensed flickr photo modified by one shared by alexik Don’t belittle me for not knowing how the great Google Machine works, but I am feeling like someone took my piece of pie. For more than a year, at NMC we’ve been running Google Apps Enterprise Edition for Education. I am more than happy not […]
- Falsebook cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog You can always count on someone sooner or later warning about the dangers of what you put online since "one day someone will google your past". I’ve already blogged about this fear, and how ridiculous the concept is if you spin it around to the suggestion– it thus […]
- 2005
- More Platefulls: The Ocotillo Sandwich Split flickr fotothe sandwichavailable on dotpolka’s flickr another fine photo from the flickr creative commons collection The 3rd installment of What’s on my plate is a double decker thick sandwich, two major events happening Friday, at two different locations. Like an overeater, I am swearing it was unavoidable, I just had to take on both sides […]
- 2004
- WikiSpam is Making me Grrrrrrrrr Attention everyone in IP 221.*.*.* and 60.*.*.* – you have been banned from our Ocotillo wikis. Sorry if you are accidently in that group, but place the blame on 221.198.73.159, 60.25.119.199, 221.196.57.131 and who has been repeatedly inserting into our wikis a mangle of URLs to strange Asian URLs, and a handful of other IPs […]
- Holy Rip-Mix-Burn-Churn! I am Feedburned! I cannot breathe! The feeds are swirling! Snatding on the shoulders of giants, Brian Lamb and David Wiley (imitation and flattery apply here) I mixed up my furl bookmarks and flickr photos with the cogdog feeds and voila! the uber feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/cogdogblog This just rocks! I have just skimmed the surface of feed burner, but […]
- UT Telecampus Learning Objects: Great Concept (But I cannot get in) Scanning the horizons of my RSS reads… XPlanazine had this new one on A Discussion with the UT TeleCampus about Learning Objects (note to XPlanazine- how about using the blog title in your template TITLE tag; it makes for more laborious furl-ing)… Jennifer Rees and Michael Anderson of UT (University of Texas) Telecampus discuss an […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 11 posts previously published on September 13th
- 2018
- Nobody Makes It Easier to Install a WordPress Calling Card Site, NOBODY It’s rather exciting to finally see this available on my Reclaim Hosting cpanel… As if I need another reason to say how awesome @ReclaimHosting is- there is a second one click install of my WordPress calling Card themes available. This is way beyond "Hello World" in Twenty-Seventeen https://t.co/WOPKvEZOod pic.twitter.com/GDtuDunH2l — Alan Levine (@cogdog) September 11, […] ➡
- 2017
- That Cool Cool Cool Iris Wall In some ways, I do miss 2009. Working last month with David Porter, I was reminded of a thing I was playing with back then… David remembers it may be better than me! That’s when I was fooling around with this browser thing called Cool Iris 3D Wall for the first round of what then […] ➡
- 2015
- If You Twitter Spam Me, I Will Mock Your T-Shirt Business Just for fun, published to medium… I Can’t Do Much About Internet Spam (But making fun of them makes me feel better) Top / Featured Image Credit: My Photoshop remix of an image spammed at me via twitter. In my book, spammers have no rights at all least of all rights to prevent me from […] ➡
- 2012
- Balloon Boys While waiting for Michael Branson Smith’s video stream to start, I played with that groovy photo on his splash screen: Why can’t Matt hang on to his balloon? And what is MBS glancing at? A story ro be told… Done by some layering, clone brushing, and pixel painting eyeballs in Photoshop Share this barking on […] ➡
- 2011
- Geology Like The Wolf cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Readers of this blog know my repeated use of the words “Amazing” and “Stories” — these are actually all around us, and there is nothing finer than when they come unexpectedly. Such was the case Monday. On my route from north of Baltimore to New […] ➡
- 2009
- Missing Pie Pieces cc licensed flickr photo modified by one shared by alexik Don’t belittle me for not knowing how the great Google Machine works, but I am feeling like someone took my piece of pie. For more than a year, at NMC we’ve been running Google Apps Enterprise Edition for Education. I am more than happy not […] ➡
- Falsebook cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog You can always count on someone sooner or later warning about the dangers of what you put online since "one day someone will google your past". I’ve already blogged about this fear, and how ridiculous the concept is if you spin it around to the suggestion– it thus […] ➡
- 2005
- More Platefulls: The Ocotillo Sandwich Split flickr fotothe sandwichavailable on dotpolka’s flickr another fine photo from the flickr creative commons collection The 3rd installment of What’s on my plate is a double decker thick sandwich, two major events happening Friday, at two different locations. Like an overeater, I am swearing it was unavoidable, I just had to take on both sides […] ➡
- 2004
- WikiSpam is Making me Grrrrrrrrr Attention everyone in IP 221.*.*.* and 60.*.*.* – you have been banned from our Ocotillo wikis. Sorry if you are accidently in that group, but place the blame on 221.198.73.159, 60.25.119.199, 221.196.57.131 and who has been repeatedly inserting into our wikis a mangle of URLs to strange Asian URLs, and a handful of other IPs […] ➡
- Holy Rip-Mix-Burn-Churn! I am Feedburned! I cannot breathe! The feeds are swirling! Snatding on the shoulders of giants, Brian Lamb and David Wiley (imitation and flattery apply here) I mixed up my furl bookmarks and flickr photos with the cogdog feeds and voila! the uber feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/cogdogblog This just rocks! I have just skimmed the surface of feed burner, but […] ➡
- UT Telecampus Learning Objects: Great Concept (But I cannot get in) Scanning the horizons of my RSS reads… XPlanazine had this new one on A Discussion with the UT TeleCampus about Learning Objects (note to XPlanazine- how about using the blog title in your template TITLE tag; it makes for more laborious furl-ing)… Jennifer Rees and Michael Anderson of UT (University of Texas) Telecampus discuss an […] ➡
// 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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