“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 June 22nd
- 2018
- Alt-ing Images: Describing Tweeted Photos Twitter recently enabled features to add descriptions to uploaded images, a huge boon for accessibility. That’s a feature, how do you make it a habit? Well, by doing it. I’ve been trying most of the time. Alt text provides additional information to the HTML created when images are embedded in web pages. The primary purpose […]
- 2016
- Old Web Bookmarklet Tool: Converts Like it is 2002 How many computer tools you used today are 14 years old? I have one. This is one of those things that happen out of conversation; I was DMing Maha Bali of all things about the weather. I know that saying it was 108º here Sunday is not useful to her as Fahrenheit (well she likely […]
- Archive Fragility My web warehouse has been emptied. In my first job in ed-tech, a 14 year stint as an instructional technologist at the Maricopa Community Colleges, I spawned a vast, messy array of web sites from 1993 until I left in 2006, hosted at http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu – that URL is retired, and should redirect to the center’s […]
- 2013
- Run Away… from your bad ass selves… Batman and Robin, so scared of the Dog. They cannot run fast enough. How could anyone resist the Batman and Robin Running Scared Assignment submitted by Michael Branson Smith There’s an awesome Tumblr blog created by That Design Bastard filled with animated GIFs of Batman and Robin Running away from sh*t. The cool thing is the […]
- 2012
- La Liberté est Amusant Following remotely from a train as our friends Brian, Keira, Grant bring us from Quebec via ds106 radio not only the sounds of the student protests but the wise words of Harry: @ds106radio "Freedom is fun." Harry. Amen little bro. #ds106radio — GNA Garcia (@DrGarcia) June 22, 2012 The scene there shared by Grant: We […]
- 2011
- It’s Time cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Lady Pain (Marta Manso) After putting out the idea for the plan three months ago, tomorrow is the day my odyssey starts. After all this talk, and planning, and buying shit, and putting shit into boxes (some are boxes that stay others are ones […]
- I Love ds106 My friend Debbie (not friend like in the real sense) (or any sense) (but it sounds good) is so popular with her eHarmony bio video, she has like 10,000,000 views. She’s a star! And thus, she has inspired me to respond to Dr O’blivion’s opening video for ds106– here it is Share this barking on […]
- 2009
- Seeking Your Amazing Stories of Openness This is my (shameless) pitch for some material for an upcoming presentation for the August 2009 OpenEd conference… also at http://cogdog.wikispaces.com/AmazingStories (archivd) modified from an original January 1935 issue found at the archive from Galactic Central Amazing Stories of Openness While the Open Education movement focuses on institutional issues, a large ocean exists of powerful […]
- Okay, I’m on the Wave A few weeks ago twitter and some blogs were all a’ gushing about the demo of Google Wave like it was the new Shimmer, maybe even more than a dessert and a floor wax. I tweeted some snark about the hype — a bit foolishly since I had not seen the demo. I failed to […]
- 2008
- Going to NECC… 13 years ago Hordes of edubloggers and more are descending on San Antonio for the NECC 2008 show (“the National Educational Computing Conference, the world’s largest educational technology conference for teachers and technology coordinators”). They will be a’blogging, twittering, flickring, tagging, ning-ing… see Vicki Davis’ coverage plan via netvibes. Colleagues like Hey Jude Judy O’Connell are winging in […]
- Battery Blues Setting Up Gigapan by cogdogblog posted 22 Jun ’08, 8.37pm MDT PST on flickr I set out today to give a test ride to a new camera device, the GigaPan, a computer controlled camera mount designed to make large detailed images of landscapes and such. However, it;s a long story, but I am without my […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 11 posts previously published on June 22nd
- 2018
- Alt-ing Images: Describing Tweeted Photos Twitter recently enabled features to add descriptions to uploaded images, a huge boon for accessibility. That’s a feature, how do you make it a habit? Well, by doing it. I’ve been trying most of the time. Alt text provides additional information to the HTML created when images are embedded in web pages. The primary purpose […] ➡
- 2016
- Old Web Bookmarklet Tool: Converts Like it is 2002 How many computer tools you used today are 14 years old? I have one. This is one of those things that happen out of conversation; I was DMing Maha Bali of all things about the weather. I know that saying it was 108º here Sunday is not useful to her as Fahrenheit (well she likely […] ➡
- Archive Fragility My web warehouse has been emptied. In my first job in ed-tech, a 14 year stint as an instructional technologist at the Maricopa Community Colleges, I spawned a vast, messy array of web sites from 1993 until I left in 2006, hosted at http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu – that URL is retired, and should redirect to the center’s […] ➡
- 2013
- Run Away… from your bad ass selves… Batman and Robin, so scared of the Dog. They cannot run fast enough. How could anyone resist the Batman and Robin Running Scared Assignment submitted by Michael Branson Smith There’s an awesome Tumblr blog created by That Design Bastard filled with animated GIFs of Batman and Robin Running away from sh*t. The cool thing is the […] ➡
- 2012
- La Liberté est Amusant Following remotely from a train as our friends Brian, Keira, Grant bring us from Quebec via ds106 radio not only the sounds of the student protests but the wise words of Harry: @ds106radio "Freedom is fun." Harry. Amen little bro. #ds106radio — GNA Garcia (@DrGarcia) June 22, 2012 The scene there shared by Grant: We […] ➡
- 2011
- It’s Time cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Lady Pain (Marta Manso) After putting out the idea for the plan three months ago, tomorrow is the day my odyssey starts. After all this talk, and planning, and buying shit, and putting shit into boxes (some are boxes that stay others are ones […] ➡
- I Love ds106 My friend Debbie (not friend like in the real sense) (or any sense) (but it sounds good) is so popular with her eHarmony bio video, she has like 10,000,000 views. She’s a star! And thus, she has inspired me to respond to Dr O’blivion’s opening video for ds106– here it is Share this barking on […] ➡
- 2009
- Seeking Your Amazing Stories of Openness This is my (shameless) pitch for some material for an upcoming presentation for the August 2009 OpenEd conference… also at http://cogdog.wikispaces.com/AmazingStories (archivd) modified from an original January 1935 issue found at the archive from Galactic Central Amazing Stories of Openness While the Open Education movement focuses on institutional issues, a large ocean exists of powerful […] ➡
- Okay, I’m on the Wave A few weeks ago twitter and some blogs were all a’ gushing about the demo of Google Wave like it was the new Shimmer, maybe even more than a dessert and a floor wax. I tweeted some snark about the hype — a bit foolishly since I had not seen the demo. I failed to […] ➡
- 2008
- Going to NECC… 13 years ago Hordes of edubloggers and more are descending on San Antonio for the NECC 2008 show (“the National Educational Computing Conference, the world’s largest educational technology conference for teachers and technology coordinators”). They will be a’blogging, twittering, flickring, tagging, ning-ing… see Vicki Davis’ coverage plan via netvibes. Colleagues like Hey Jude Judy O’Connell are winging in […] ➡
- Battery Blues Setting Up Gigapan by cogdogblog posted 22 Jun ’08, 8.37pm MDT PST on flickr I set out today to give a test ride to a new camera device, the GigaPan, a computer controlled camera mount designed to make large detailed images of landscapes and such. However, it;s a long story, but I am without my […] ➡
// 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.
