“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 14 posts previously published on August 9th
- 2021
- What the Olde Links Say About Domains Shouldn’t the idea of publishing on the web mean generating something that can “echo all around the world”? Once again, my experience shows that if you publish something on an employer’s web site, or a company’s web site, or even in something that just takes away the work of managing web sites, the chances of […]
- 2018
- My Twitter Reach is Directly Proportional to Silliness I’ve been tweeting since January 2007 (and am infasionable not yet a Deleter). Big deal. For all the times I have crafted a tweet thinking it would put some ripples in the pond, or make commentary, I can say the sum results of all this is crickets. No biggie. So it gives me some smile, […]
- 2017
- No Service It’s been more than two hours since all connectivity went down. Electricity is on and I am getting news from NPR via my old boom box radio. It’s just regular stories- dogs, schools, Glen Campbell tributes, local politics. No klaxons or announcers urging everyone to be calm. So the North Korean bombing has not started. […]
- 2015
- The UDG Agora Challenge Bank- Newest Iteration of DS106 Assignment Bankenstein Am major component to the UDG Agora Project is the Challenge Bank I put into place… and after two weeks of intense use for our face to face sessions in Guadalajara, I am quivering in relief that it worked w/o going up in flames. It got close to 37,000 accesses in that time frame, a […]
- The Web Feels Fine to Me It’s hip now to lament the loss of some romanticized web. It’s lost. It’s dead. No the same folks say it’s not dead. Wait a minute, in 2015 it is finally dead. We have to save it (actually we do). It’s boring. It’s lost that loving feeling. It needs to be made fun again. My […]
- 2014
- Bunk y Omar Conversan con Miradas I happily resume my role in ds106 as an open participant. With the new season starting in September at UMW being based on The Wire, I finally have the right reason to watch the whole series again (one of only two I’ve ever watched start to end; not only am I a MOOC dropout, I […]
- 2011
- Likes are Cheap This post was rolling around the doghouse before I left home, before Google’s play, so you can include “+1 is cheap” as well. I have little problem kicking Facebook around, I am not one to nuke my account, but my use is casual. Frankly, each experience is like opening the fridge door and smelling something […]
- 2005
- Dirt Burner Expertise flickr foto SAC 2005 at Snowmasavailable on my flickr Not convinced of the “expertise” around Snowmass Village? This is the way to start a conference morning at the Seminars in Academic Computing (SAC) conference. Monday was an early morning hike “up the hill” (past the ski lift end) with Phil Long, Trent Batson, and Cyprien […]
- Conference Blogging Day two of the Seminars on Academic Community conference in lovely Snowmass…. I am reflecting that conferencing blogging is tiring work for me… Yesterday, in the morning keynote session, I was sharing note writing with Cyprien Lomas in a shared space of SubEthaEdit. We both talked later about how that experience played out- we were […]
- What Are We Playing At? (SAC2005) What Are We Playing At What it means to integrate games into the curriculum and why we should Richard Van Eck University of North Dakota Presentation and Game Analysis Packet available http://idt.und.edu/ A good session with a sound approach to Game-Based Learning, look for resources from the presentation. Good discussion form the audience. Bottom line- […]
- Principles of Distributed Representation (SAC2005) Principles of Distributed Representation Stephen Downes “Not another metadata talk” he promises…. since Stephen puts his presentations online, and I saw him turn on Audacity to record his own session, I am bowing out of taking copious notes (well no, I changed my mind, see below) While the intros are going, Stephen has a nice […]
- 2004
- Best Quote (Today) About HTML Phil Ringnalda provides a surgical view of the new MSN blog pages- beyond the wonderfully dense details, I loved this quote: The HTML is, of course, execrable. The one possible way they could have gotten some approving buzz from tech bloggers was to use extremely clean (X)HTML, but given the apparent total lack of a […]
- Gooey GUI Bloopers- Web Site Must Be a Self Referential Joke? I picked this one off the pile of RSS feeds, GUI Bloopers a site supporting a book about software design “mistakes”. I have to admit to not doing more than scanning the table of contents, so the book may be a fine treasure indeed, but the web page here just makes me gag up kibbles […]
- 2003
- Awesome RSS Resource at Lockergnome Chris Pirillo has a new comprehensive site on Lockergnome’s RSS Resource (tip of the blog hat to Will for this one). It features a wide range of stories on new types of RSS uses (e.g. notifying beta testers of software updates) and the latest in tools and technology, written by a team of contributers. We […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 14 posts previously published on August 9th
- 2021
- What the Olde Links Say About Domains Shouldn’t the idea of publishing on the web mean generating something that can “echo all around the world”? Once again, my experience shows that if you publish something on an employer’s web site, or a company’s web site, or even in something that just takes away the work of managing web sites, the chances of […] ➡
- 2018
- My Twitter Reach is Directly Proportional to Silliness I’ve been tweeting since January 2007 (and am infasionable not yet a Deleter). Big deal. For all the times I have crafted a tweet thinking it would put some ripples in the pond, or make commentary, I can say the sum results of all this is crickets. No biggie. So it gives me some smile, […] ➡
- 2017
- No Service It’s been more than two hours since all connectivity went down. Electricity is on and I am getting news from NPR via my old boom box radio. It’s just regular stories- dogs, schools, Glen Campbell tributes, local politics. No klaxons or announcers urging everyone to be calm. So the North Korean bombing has not started. […] ➡
- 2015
- The UDG Agora Challenge Bank- Newest Iteration of DS106 Assignment Bankenstein Am major component to the UDG Agora Project is the Challenge Bank I put into place… and after two weeks of intense use for our face to face sessions in Guadalajara, I am quivering in relief that it worked w/o going up in flames. It got close to 37,000 accesses in that time frame, a […] ➡
- The Web Feels Fine to Me It’s hip now to lament the loss of some romanticized web. It’s lost. It’s dead. No the same folks say it’s not dead. Wait a minute, in 2015 it is finally dead. We have to save it (actually we do). It’s boring. It’s lost that loving feeling. It needs to be made fun again. My […] ➡
- 2014
- Bunk y Omar Conversan con Miradas I happily resume my role in ds106 as an open participant. With the new season starting in September at UMW being based on The Wire, I finally have the right reason to watch the whole series again (one of only two I’ve ever watched start to end; not only am I a MOOC dropout, I […] ➡
- 2011
- Likes are Cheap This post was rolling around the doghouse before I left home, before Google’s play, so you can include “+1 is cheap” as well. I have little problem kicking Facebook around, I am not one to nuke my account, but my use is casual. Frankly, each experience is like opening the fridge door and smelling something […] ➡
- 2005
- Dirt Burner Expertise flickr foto SAC 2005 at Snowmasavailable on my flickr Not convinced of the “expertise” around Snowmass Village? This is the way to start a conference morning at the Seminars in Academic Computing (SAC) conference. Monday was an early morning hike “up the hill” (past the ski lift end) with Phil Long, Trent Batson, and Cyprien […] ➡
- Conference Blogging Day two of the Seminars on Academic Community conference in lovely Snowmass…. I am reflecting that conferencing blogging is tiring work for me… Yesterday, in the morning keynote session, I was sharing note writing with Cyprien Lomas in a shared space of SubEthaEdit. We both talked later about how that experience played out- we were […] ➡
- What Are We Playing At? (SAC2005) What Are We Playing At What it means to integrate games into the curriculum and why we should Richard Van Eck University of North Dakota Presentation and Game Analysis Packet available http://idt.und.edu/ A good session with a sound approach to Game-Based Learning, look for resources from the presentation. Good discussion form the audience. Bottom line- […] ➡
- Principles of Distributed Representation (SAC2005) Principles of Distributed Representation Stephen Downes “Not another metadata talk” he promises…. since Stephen puts his presentations online, and I saw him turn on Audacity to record his own session, I am bowing out of taking copious notes (well no, I changed my mind, see below) While the intros are going, Stephen has a nice […] ➡
- 2004
- Best Quote (Today) About HTML Phil Ringnalda provides a surgical view of the new MSN blog pages- beyond the wonderfully dense details, I loved this quote: The HTML is, of course, execrable. The one possible way they could have gotten some approving buzz from tech bloggers was to use extremely clean (X)HTML, but given the apparent total lack of a […] ➡
- Gooey GUI Bloopers- Web Site Must Be a Self Referential Joke? I picked this one off the pile of RSS feeds, GUI Bloopers a site supporting a book about software design “mistakes”. I have to admit to not doing more than scanning the table of contents, so the book may be a fine treasure indeed, but the web page here just makes me gag up kibbles […] ➡
- 2003
- Awesome RSS Resource at Lockergnome Chris Pirillo has a new comprehensive site on Lockergnome’s RSS Resource (tip of the blog hat to Will for this one). It features a wide range of stories on new types of RSS uses (e.g. notifying beta testers of software updates) and the latest in tools and technology, written by a team of contributers. We […] ➡
// 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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