“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 9 posts previously published on August 28th
- 2022
- Do Look at Don’t Look At My Photos Or don’t. I always forgot about this domain, but smile when I see the renewal notice from Reclaim Hosting. They gave it to me in 2014 as a twitter contest to pick a novel vanity name. It’s one of the few contests I’ve ever won, for tweeting my idea– dontlookatmy.photos (see the requisite explanatory blog […]
- 11 and 21 This post was intended for August 27, and I could even get the energy for the tapping it in until the wee hours, slipping into August 28. This is the day to remember, honor, tell a few stories about my Dad, who left this world August 27, 2001 and my Mom, who followed him 10 […]
- 2020
- 9 and 19 August 27 loomed… and now passes by on the calendar. Flip, another year. This one marks 19 years since my Dad passed away. A flip the bird to stomach cancer. And then 10 years later to the day, Mom succumbed to a heart attack. The same day. Not a coincidense. Just marked here with another […]
- 2017
- Selfie circa 1988 How it was done in the old days, with a film camera and a mirror. That’s my trusty old Nikkormat (sadly gpne) set up in my bathroom in Mesa. I had darkroom equipment then and processed image in the same bathroom. You kids and your sticks and mobile phones 😉 Yesterday I cracked open the […]
- Hypercard Archeostackology I’m digging down to the code fragments of some of my first technology work, finding but fragments and relics in the layers bit dated 1992-1994. I credit/blame Tom Cc @cogdog https://t.co/d86h5phOyj — Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) August 19, 2017 I had briefly seen mention of the Internet Archive’s collection of Hypercard Stacks using a webpased eumlator. […]
- 2013
- WordPress Dashboard Menus of Your Own In my development work on the template for a ds106 assignment bank site I’ve been learning a bit more how through code I can add menus and submenu items to the wordpress dashboard. I was thinking about that while editing some of the items set in the queue for the Daily Create. On this site, […]
- 2012
- The Rocket of ds106 cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by jurvetson The first day of action for my online section of ds106 could not have been more impressive. A lengthly email went out last night, and as of a little over 24 hours later, 19 out of 25 of my students registered their domains, and most […]
- 2008
- Me. WordCamp 2008. Video. Eek. John P of One Mans Blog (great tagline: Specialization is for Insects) was a busy camera guy at WordCamp 2008. I just got word (via a flickr comment) that the video of my session on It’s All You Can WordPress at the EduBlog Diner is now on viddler (and not exactly as it was/is billed […]
- 2004
- Blogs and Wikis: Two Outstanding EDUCAUSE Review Articles Wow. That’s about all, I can summarize. Wow. The newest EDCAUSE Review (September/October 2004) has not one, but two top notch articles on things near and dear to the CogDog, blogs and wikis. These are so good I am ready to print them, something I almost never do. In Educational Blogging Stephen Downes not only […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 9 posts previously published on August 28th
- 2022
- Do Look at Don’t Look At My Photos Or don’t. I always forgot about this domain, but smile when I see the renewal notice from Reclaim Hosting. They gave it to me in 2014 as a twitter contest to pick a novel vanity name. It’s one of the few contests I’ve ever won, for tweeting my idea– dontlookatmy.photos (see the requisite explanatory blog […] ➡
- 11 and 21 This post was intended for August 27, and I could even get the energy for the tapping it in until the wee hours, slipping into August 28. This is the day to remember, honor, tell a few stories about my Dad, who left this world August 27, 2001 and my Mom, who followed him 10 […] ➡
- 2020
- 9 and 19 August 27 loomed… and now passes by on the calendar. Flip, another year. This one marks 19 years since my Dad passed away. A flip the bird to stomach cancer. And then 10 years later to the day, Mom succumbed to a heart attack. The same day. Not a coincidense. Just marked here with another […] ➡
- 2017
- Selfie circa 1988 How it was done in the old days, with a film camera and a mirror. That’s my trusty old Nikkormat (sadly gpne) set up in my bathroom in Mesa. I had darkroom equipment then and processed image in the same bathroom. You kids and your sticks and mobile phones 😉 Yesterday I cracked open the […] ➡
- Hypercard Archeostackology I’m digging down to the code fragments of some of my first technology work, finding but fragments and relics in the layers bit dated 1992-1994. I credit/blame Tom Cc @cogdog https://t.co/d86h5phOyj — Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) August 19, 2017 I had briefly seen mention of the Internet Archive’s collection of Hypercard Stacks using a webpased eumlator. […] ➡
- 2013
- WordPress Dashboard Menus of Your Own In my development work on the template for a ds106 assignment bank site I’ve been learning a bit more how through code I can add menus and submenu items to the wordpress dashboard. I was thinking about that while editing some of the items set in the queue for the Daily Create. On this site, […] ➡
- 2012
- The Rocket of ds106 cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by jurvetson The first day of action for my online section of ds106 could not have been more impressive. A lengthly email went out last night, and as of a little over 24 hours later, 19 out of 25 of my students registered their domains, and most […] ➡
- 2008
- Me. WordCamp 2008. Video. Eek. John P of One Mans Blog (great tagline: Specialization is for Insects) was a busy camera guy at WordCamp 2008. I just got word (via a flickr comment) that the video of my session on It’s All You Can WordPress at the EduBlog Diner is now on viddler (and not exactly as it was/is billed […] ➡
- 2004
- Blogs and Wikis: Two Outstanding EDUCAUSE Review Articles Wow. That’s about all, I can summarize. Wow. The newest EDCAUSE Review (September/October 2004) has not one, but two top notch articles on things near and dear to the CogDog, blogs and wikis. These are so good I am ready to print them, something I almost never do. In Educational Blogging Stephen Downes not only […] ➡
// 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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