“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 February 14th
- 2016
- Funkier Than An Algorithm’s Tweeter I’ve been enjoying listening to more doses of classic Ike and Tina Turner funk and R&B; these are in my collection thanks to @easegill sharing me his entire South Pacific music library when I visited New Zealand in 2015. This one song came on today that really caught my attention with it’s groove: (It has […]
- 2015
- Is Bob’s Web Site the Future Geocities? I was just looking around on the web. No, not really wandering, In prep for an upcoming talk where I want to put the web of 1996 in context, I googled for popular Songs of 1996 (notice the typo!). Note the top result, above Wikipedia, above some commercial site: As it turns out, this site […]
- 2013
- Blitzing Photos the ds106 Way Part of this this week’s ds106 work on Visual Storytelling is the “photoblitz”. We ran this in the in person sections last year as one way of making the class sessions active; we would give students 4 photo assignments to find examples of within the building our class was in. The idea was just to […]
- 2012
- Slice 10: Dying on Stage creative commons licensed image from joe_x A mopey audio reflection following my second in person class of ds106, from two weeks ago. Seven minutes and forty six seconds of blah. http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/audio/slice-010.mp3 Recorded walking home after a class that just did not flow well at all. I did not feel in best game form, the students […]
- Calling Card for a Fast Moving Hard Working Cop Last year in ds106 I built a few of my assignments out of the movie Dirty Harry — and having seen this movie just last night, I am just shifting to another classic San Francisco cop, Bullitt. I did this for the Bad Guy Business Cards design assignment — and completely missing that it said […]
- 1 Movie / 4 Icons Oops, I got in my mind to do a ds106 design assignment, and ended up doing a visual one! Oh well, it’s done. This is for the Four Icon Challenge (which to me should be design!): Reduce a movie, story, or event into it’s basic elements, then take those visuals and reduce them further to […]
- 2010
- Shut That Blog Up, Will Ya? The recent flip of the calendar (well not so recent, jeez, it’s been two weeks) reminds me that February is the time for my annual blog hiatus– I take some time off from posting here and devote my attention to commenting on other people’s blogs. This makes for the fifth annual CogDogBlogMuzzle, having done so […]
- 2008
- WordPressing Dissected: NMC Pachyderm Services Let me join the Jim Groom Kum-Ba-Ya I Love WordPress Chorus. In this least year, I’ve rolled out 3 NMC web sites that are published via WordPress, with each one going deeper into the bowels of the templates and just more jazzed how I can bend them to my will, casting CSS, PHP, plugins, MySQL […]
- 2007
- My Reader Runneth Over Between travel earlier this week for NMC meetings, time off between now and Monday, and squeezing in many late night hours banging our new drupal site (should be able to share it in a few weeks), I’m feeling way behind the blog train. Just sifting through my RSS feeds, I am compelled to send a […]
- 2006
- Presentation as Conversation (and Levine’s Law) I know I am repeating thoughts written elsewhere recently, but another great ah ha from the week here in Vancouver has been participating in conference sessions that were conducted primarily in conversational mode, in engagement with an audience, as opposed to the traditional mode of presentation as lecture, inflicted onto an audience. This is just […]
- The Dissonance of “Blogs in Education” It’s only been a few days since a number of fabulous presentation as conversation sessions on blogs, social software, and education here in Vancouver (I am still lingering at chez Lamb). D’Arcy has already posted a superultimate summary that distills the summaries quite nicely, and I am one of many where at our UBC and […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 11 posts previously published on February 14th
- 2016
- Funkier Than An Algorithm’s Tweeter I’ve been enjoying listening to more doses of classic Ike and Tina Turner funk and R&B; these are in my collection thanks to @easegill sharing me his entire South Pacific music library when I visited New Zealand in 2015. This one song came on today that really caught my attention with it’s groove: (It has […] ➡
- 2015
- Is Bob’s Web Site the Future Geocities? I was just looking around on the web. No, not really wandering, In prep for an upcoming talk where I want to put the web of 1996 in context, I googled for popular Songs of 1996 (notice the typo!). Note the top result, above Wikipedia, above some commercial site: As it turns out, this site […] ➡
- 2013
- Blitzing Photos the ds106 Way Part of this this week’s ds106 work on Visual Storytelling is the “photoblitz”. We ran this in the in person sections last year as one way of making the class sessions active; we would give students 4 photo assignments to find examples of within the building our class was in. The idea was just to […] ➡
- 2012
- Slice 10: Dying on Stage creative commons licensed image from joe_x A mopey audio reflection following my second in person class of ds106, from two weeks ago. Seven minutes and forty six seconds of blah. http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/audio/slice-010.mp3 Recorded walking home after a class that just did not flow well at all. I did not feel in best game form, the students […] ➡
- Calling Card for a Fast Moving Hard Working Cop Last year in ds106 I built a few of my assignments out of the movie Dirty Harry — and having seen this movie just last night, I am just shifting to another classic San Francisco cop, Bullitt. I did this for the Bad Guy Business Cards design assignment — and completely missing that it said […] ➡
- 1 Movie / 4 Icons Oops, I got in my mind to do a ds106 design assignment, and ended up doing a visual one! Oh well, it’s done. This is for the Four Icon Challenge (which to me should be design!): Reduce a movie, story, or event into it’s basic elements, then take those visuals and reduce them further to […] ➡
- 2010
- Shut That Blog Up, Will Ya? The recent flip of the calendar (well not so recent, jeez, it’s been two weeks) reminds me that February is the time for my annual blog hiatus– I take some time off from posting here and devote my attention to commenting on other people’s blogs. This makes for the fifth annual CogDogBlogMuzzle, having done so […] ➡
- 2008
- WordPressing Dissected: NMC Pachyderm Services Let me join the Jim Groom Kum-Ba-Ya I Love WordPress Chorus. In this least year, I’ve rolled out 3 NMC web sites that are published via WordPress, with each one going deeper into the bowels of the templates and just more jazzed how I can bend them to my will, casting CSS, PHP, plugins, MySQL […] ➡
- 2007
- My Reader Runneth Over Between travel earlier this week for NMC meetings, time off between now and Monday, and squeezing in many late night hours banging our new drupal site (should be able to share it in a few weeks), I’m feeling way behind the blog train. Just sifting through my RSS feeds, I am compelled to send a […] ➡
- 2006
- Presentation as Conversation (and Levine’s Law) I know I am repeating thoughts written elsewhere recently, but another great ah ha from the week here in Vancouver has been participating in conference sessions that were conducted primarily in conversational mode, in engagement with an audience, as opposed to the traditional mode of presentation as lecture, inflicted onto an audience. This is just […] ➡
- The Dissonance of “Blogs in Education” It’s only been a few days since a number of fabulous presentation as conversation sessions on blogs, social software, and education here in Vancouver (I am still lingering at chez Lamb). D’Arcy has already posted a superultimate summary that distills the summaries quite nicely, and I am one of many where at our UBC and […] ➡
// 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.
