“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 October 28th
- 2021
- A Fortunate Twitter Stumble There are few things better (for me) than inadvertently coming across a fabulous web site, resource, tool, or just a curious link– even better when I was not looking for it. Cue the theme music of Web Serendipity… On a break from work (I swear it was a break, honestly) I saw something Laura Gibbs […]
- 2019
- Stay Curious With Una Foto Cada Día It’s no secret around about my love and belief in the practice of taking/sharing daily photos. I’m in my 12th year; this is maybe when practice – obsession? The idea too has resonated in DS106 as the Daily Create, at today’s number 2846, you can do some math and find this has gone on non-stop […]
- 2015
- #WhyIWrite It Feels Wrong to Not Write A bit late for Kevin’s call for responses for Why I Write. Mine is pretty close to what my friend Karen wrote in the Google Slide Deck Kevin offered: I write because it makes me happy and I cannot not write. It’s that second part that I latch on to — I cannot not write. […]
- 2012
- Fishing Google for Cache When ds106 Server Bites the Dust cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by indieink Beyond the unpredictable outages from high usage of the ds106 web site (well not so unpredictable, Sunday evenings are common) students are not allowed “the web site is down” as an excuse. Martha has already covered this from the last time we had […]
- Havalinas Today I am driving across a rainy country road in southern Ontario, thinking a little of home, and out of the random shuffle of songs on my ipod comes a lovely, haunting, but lovel song by the Pixies that I mist have neve tuned my ears to before… did they sing “Sedona”? Indeed, after the […]
- 2011
- Music Mapped Video (new ds106 assignment) Here’s my idea for a new ds106 assignment- Sync up a song with an annotated google map, and mix as a video. It is a sideways step from using maps as stories. It’s easy to go literal, find a song that references geographic locations. To create an example, I went for Route 66, especially relevant […]
- Spaces: Haiku It Up From Tokyo we are seeing a nice ds106 activity surge in the Haiku It Up writing assignment created by Shinichiro- what is most lovely is how the author has elaborated on the meaning and structure of haiku beyond just the syllable forumala we learn in grade school here in the US. Haiku, known as the […]
- 2010
- Twitter is Officially Social Software (good thing you did not step in it) cc licensed flickr photo shared by Horrortaxi Among the clever Shirkyisms is his observation on people tagging spam target links Back In The Day, when I was trying to explain what I meant when I was talking about social software, but before Coates pulled my fat out of the fire by doing the work for […]
- 2008
- Web 0.02 Technology The Lamest Unsubscribe Method Evuh by cogdogblog posted 28 Oct ’08, 10.18pm MDT PST on flickr TeacherTube, blecccch. Never used, and surely never will. I’m trying to winnow down the crap emails form my inbox. Along comes a “newsletter”, unsolicited, unrequested, from TeacherTube. I zipped to the bottom and clicked the “unsubscribe” link. Wouldn’t you […]
- 2005
- Cover Art Where else but the internet could this happen? More than a year ago, I got an email from someone in Germany working with a music group called “Sea Level”. They had somehow managed to find this photo I had lumped somewhere in an old photo directory: This photo was taken in Death Valley California with […]
- Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Alex Tew, 21, want to go to college, so he is earning it one pixel at a time on The Million Dollar Home Page: The idea is simple: to try and make $1m (US) by selling 1,000,000 pixels for $1 each. Hence, ‘The Million Dollar Homepage”. The main motivation for doing this is to pay […]
- Blogmenting I’ve not been blogging.. much. On the other hand, something that was always utterly fascinating to me is the concept of “comment blogging”, someone who has no self-published blogs, but actively participates and ‘exists’ more distributed-like in the comment space of other people’s blogs. Often, I have found this to be a missing piece of […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 12 posts previously published on October 28th
- 2021
- A Fortunate Twitter Stumble There are few things better (for me) than inadvertently coming across a fabulous web site, resource, tool, or just a curious link– even better when I was not looking for it. Cue the theme music of Web Serendipity… On a break from work (I swear it was a break, honestly) I saw something Laura Gibbs […] ➡
- 2019
- Stay Curious With Una Foto Cada Día It’s no secret around about my love and belief in the practice of taking/sharing daily photos. I’m in my 12th year; this is maybe when practice – obsession? The idea too has resonated in DS106 as the Daily Create, at today’s number 2846, you can do some math and find this has gone on non-stop […] ➡
- 2015
- #WhyIWrite It Feels Wrong to Not Write A bit late for Kevin’s call for responses for Why I Write. Mine is pretty close to what my friend Karen wrote in the Google Slide Deck Kevin offered: I write because it makes me happy and I cannot not write. It’s that second part that I latch on to — I cannot not write. […] ➡
- 2012
- Fishing Google for Cache When ds106 Server Bites the Dust cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by indieink Beyond the unpredictable outages from high usage of the ds106 web site (well not so unpredictable, Sunday evenings are common) students are not allowed “the web site is down” as an excuse. Martha has already covered this from the last time we had […] ➡
- Havalinas Today I am driving across a rainy country road in southern Ontario, thinking a little of home, and out of the random shuffle of songs on my ipod comes a lovely, haunting, but lovel song by the Pixies that I mist have neve tuned my ears to before… did they sing “Sedona”? Indeed, after the […] ➡
- 2011
- Music Mapped Video (new ds106 assignment) Here’s my idea for a new ds106 assignment- Sync up a song with an annotated google map, and mix as a video. It is a sideways step from using maps as stories. It’s easy to go literal, find a song that references geographic locations. To create an example, I went for Route 66, especially relevant […] ➡
- Spaces: Haiku It Up From Tokyo we are seeing a nice ds106 activity surge in the Haiku It Up writing assignment created by Shinichiro- what is most lovely is how the author has elaborated on the meaning and structure of haiku beyond just the syllable forumala we learn in grade school here in the US. Haiku, known as the […] ➡
- 2010
- 2008
- Web 0.02 Technology The Lamest Unsubscribe Method Evuh by cogdogblog posted 28 Oct ’08, 10.18pm MDT PST on flickr TeacherTube, blecccch. Never used, and surely never will. I’m trying to winnow down the crap emails form my inbox. Along comes a “newsletter”, unsolicited, unrequested, from TeacherTube. I zipped to the bottom and clicked the “unsubscribe” link. Wouldn’t you […] ➡
- 2005
- Cover Art Where else but the internet could this happen? More than a year ago, I got an email from someone in Germany working with a music group called “Sea Level”. They had somehow managed to find this photo I had lumped somewhere in an old photo directory: This photo was taken in Death Valley California with […] ➡
- Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Alex Tew, 21, want to go to college, so he is earning it one pixel at a time on The Million Dollar Home Page: The idea is simple: to try and make $1m (US) by selling 1,000,000 pixels for $1 each. Hence, ‘The Million Dollar Homepage”. The main motivation for doing this is to pay […] ➡
- Blogmenting I’ve not been blogging.. much. On the other hand, something that was always utterly fascinating to me is the concept of “comment blogging”, someone who has no self-published blogs, but actively participates and ‘exists’ more distributed-like in the comment space of other people’s blogs. Often, I have found this to be a missing piece 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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