“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 6 posts previously published on July 30th
- 2020
- Zooming With A Talking Alpaca I should just end the post with this as a title. Leave ’em guessing, right? It was appropriate today started reading an utterly brilliant essay by Parimal Satyal, Rediscovering The Small Web (thanks to Jay Hoffman): Most websites today are built like commercial products by professionals and marketers, optimised to draw the largest audience, generate […]
- 2018
- Coding Tiny WordPress Inner Tweaks Nobody May Ever Notice That shift from using a tool for a task to reshaping it for a future one is maybe the thing I love most about my efforts at coding (given my lesser skills with real hand tools). Quite often I find myself making small tweaks to things I know are in my projects; but will anyone […]
- 2012
- Conflating the Parts with the Whole: Fast Food Education cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Kitchen Wench I bet there are bloggers out there who write outlines, and carefully craft their ideas in drafts, and revisions. Generally, I start out withe the classic half baked quarter thought eight pondered idea and see where it goes. This one could be a […]
- 2008
- “I Love Moo” “I Love Moo Too” (and Little Moo, Big Moo…) Again I am embarrassingly late to embrace a trend. Moo cards have been around like since Web 1.6 – those slick half sized business cards that feature a different image on each card, and quite often images personally picked from flickr. Thanks to a friend who slipped me a promo code to get a discount […]
- 2005
- My New Flickr Data Generator flickr foto New Toyavailable on my flickr I just got this new camera, a Canon Digital Rebel XT– going back to being a newbie learning a whole new interface. 8 MegaPixel SLR, wahoo! I’ve been saving up my spare change and with some help from sideline consulting, I bought a new digital camera, this Canon […]
- 2003
- Boris Finds Emerson RSS from Amazon Just days before packing his bags to leave for the MERLOT 2003 Conference, our humanities learning object Blogger “Boris” gets rather clever. He has found out how to get RSS feeds from Amazon.com on his favorite American literature movement, see object human: Amazon.com Feeds for Transcendentalism What Boris has found is rather interesting, and completely […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 6 posts previously published on July 30th
- 2020
- Zooming With A Talking Alpaca I should just end the post with this as a title. Leave ’em guessing, right? It was appropriate today started reading an utterly brilliant essay by Parimal Satyal, Rediscovering The Small Web (thanks to Jay Hoffman): Most websites today are built like commercial products by professionals and marketers, optimised to draw the largest audience, generate […] ➡
- 2018
- Coding Tiny WordPress Inner Tweaks Nobody May Ever Notice That shift from using a tool for a task to reshaping it for a future one is maybe the thing I love most about my efforts at coding (given my lesser skills with real hand tools). Quite often I find myself making small tweaks to things I know are in my projects; but will anyone […] ➡
- 2012
- Conflating the Parts with the Whole: Fast Food Education cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Kitchen Wench I bet there are bloggers out there who write outlines, and carefully craft their ideas in drafts, and revisions. Generally, I start out withe the classic half baked quarter thought eight pondered idea and see where it goes. This one could be a […] ➡
- 2008
- “I Love Moo” “I Love Moo Too” (and Little Moo, Big Moo…) Again I am embarrassingly late to embrace a trend. Moo cards have been around like since Web 1.6 – those slick half sized business cards that feature a different image on each card, and quite often images personally picked from flickr. Thanks to a friend who slipped me a promo code to get a discount […] ➡
- 2005
- My New Flickr Data Generator flickr foto New Toyavailable on my flickr I just got this new camera, a Canon Digital Rebel XT– going back to being a newbie learning a whole new interface. 8 MegaPixel SLR, wahoo! I’ve been saving up my spare change and with some help from sideline consulting, I bought a new digital camera, this Canon […] ➡
- 2003
- Boris Finds Emerson RSS from Amazon Just days before packing his bags to leave for the MERLOT 2003 Conference, our humanities learning object Blogger “Boris” gets rather clever. He has found out how to get RSS feeds from Amazon.com on his favorite American literature movement, see object human: Amazon.com Feeds for Transcendentalism What Boris has found is rather interesting, and completely […] ➡
// 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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