“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 2nd
- 2023
- Getting a Fill of Generative Fill While there is plenty of academics undergarment wadding over AI generative text (and please stop referring to it all as ChatGPT), I was first interested and still in the generation of images (a year ago Craiyon was the leading edge, now it looks like a sad nub of burnt sienna). Get ready for everything to […]
- 2015
- Some Guy in Japan Painted My Flickr Photo… that is teh awesome! File this one in the Unexpected Wonderful Internet Things That Started With an Almost Random Click department. I do like to know when someone comments on my flickr photos. In a previous version of the mobile app, what it showed for notifications matched the settings you make on the web for your flickr activity. You […]
- When The MOOC is Over… Dumb idea. Why did this little worm crawl in my head today? New silly idea brewing for a cover song that mocks moocs… — Alan Levine (@cogdog) June 1, 2015 Someone was tweeting about the end of an open course. I have this thing about talking about the finality of something. Some things should end. […]
- 2009
- All I Know About Wave It can be pretty: cc licensed flickr photo shared by prgibbs Our flags do it in the breeze cc licensed flickr photo shared by ladybugbkt It can be exciting! cc licensed flickr photo shared by (nz)dave It is a sign of old fashioned social networking cc licensed flickr photo shared by striatic It defines how […]
- 2006
- One Last Bark at Flickr I have received a lot of interesting commentary, and support from the bone I had to pick with flickr about a new pro account being designated not public due to the imagery being all snapshots taken in Second Life. The response I did not get, sadly, was from Ana at case88575@support.flickr.com whom I had last […]
- Longtail of Social Groups? Nice Flickr Pools flickr foto Cactifittiavailable on flickr This is a photo from last year’s trip to Hawaii, but someone found another one from this same place and invited me to share it in a flickr pool devoted to grafitti on plants (who woulda thunk?). This is near the top of Makapu’u point on Oahu. I usually wax […]
- 2005
- Today’s Jots Online Dictionary, Encyclopedia and Thesaurus. Free access. English, Medical, Legal, Financial, and Computer Dictionaries, Thesaurus, Acronyms, Encyclopedia, a Literature Reference Library, and a Search Engine all in one! Tags: reference MBoffin.com – Designline – A Design Timeline I have often wondered what it would be like to see a web site design progress from start […]
- 2004
- The Word is Out: Small Technologies Loosely Joined – NMC 2004 Diffusing through blogspace, beyond our control, goes an upcoming “presentation” at the June 2004 NMC Conference, what we have cobbled together is called “Small Technologies Loosely Joined: Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control” that I am doing with colleagues Brian Lamb and D’Arcy Norman. Here I will talk a bit about what we have in […]
- Feed2JS: A Few More Tweaks and WordPress Date Woes Thanks for the comments that have helped identify some minor and not so minor issues with our new Feed to Javascript site. See below for updates! Some updates for folks that have implemented their own versions of this: A few early versions had a typo where the MAGPIE_CACHE_DIR was defined (it said MAGPIE_DIR). Most problems […]
- Find Out Who You Really Are: The Vanity of Googlism Tired: Doing a google on your own name. Wired: Reading a Googlism on your own name. Expired: Looking up your name in a phone book. What is Googlism? The best why to find out is to explore, but more or less, it uses the “collective” wisdom of the Google API to extract a list of […]
- 2003
- Beginnings of the blogShop This is the start of our online workshop, or “blogshop” for showing faculty at our colleges a little bit about weblogs, and to get them started using MovableType. It should ba a grand adventure! Share this barking on social media
On Michael’s site he might use There are 11 posts previously published on June 2nd
- 2023
- Getting a Fill of Generative Fill While there is plenty of academics undergarment wadding over AI generative text (and please stop referring to it all as ChatGPT), I was first interested and still in the generation of images (a year ago Craiyon was the leading edge, now it looks like a sad nub of burnt sienna). Get ready for everything to […] ➡
- 2015
- Some Guy in Japan Painted My Flickr Photo… that is teh awesome! File this one in the Unexpected Wonderful Internet Things That Started With an Almost Random Click department. I do like to know when someone comments on my flickr photos. In a previous version of the mobile app, what it showed for notifications matched the settings you make on the web for your flickr activity. You […] ➡
- When The MOOC is Over… Dumb idea. Why did this little worm crawl in my head today? New silly idea brewing for a cover song that mocks moocs… — Alan Levine (@cogdog) June 1, 2015 Someone was tweeting about the end of an open course. I have this thing about talking about the finality of something. Some things should end. […] ➡
- 2009
- All I Know About Wave It can be pretty: cc licensed flickr photo shared by prgibbs Our flags do it in the breeze cc licensed flickr photo shared by ladybugbkt It can be exciting! cc licensed flickr photo shared by (nz)dave It is a sign of old fashioned social networking cc licensed flickr photo shared by striatic It defines how […] ➡
- 2006
- One Last Bark at Flickr I have received a lot of interesting commentary, and support from the bone I had to pick with flickr about a new pro account being designated not public due to the imagery being all snapshots taken in Second Life. The response I did not get, sadly, was from Ana at case88575@support.flickr.com whom I had last […] ➡
- Longtail of Social Groups? Nice Flickr Pools flickr foto Cactifittiavailable on flickr This is a photo from last year’s trip to Hawaii, but someone found another one from this same place and invited me to share it in a flickr pool devoted to grafitti on plants (who woulda thunk?). This is near the top of Makapu’u point on Oahu. I usually wax […] ➡
- 2005
- Today’s Jots Online Dictionary, Encyclopedia and Thesaurus. Free access. English, Medical, Legal, Financial, and Computer Dictionaries, Thesaurus, Acronyms, Encyclopedia, a Literature Reference Library, and a Search Engine all in one! Tags: reference MBoffin.com – Designline – A Design Timeline I have often wondered what it would be like to see a web site design progress from start […] ➡
- 2004
- The Word is Out: Small Technologies Loosely Joined – NMC 2004 Diffusing through blogspace, beyond our control, goes an upcoming “presentation” at the June 2004 NMC Conference, what we have cobbled together is called “Small Technologies Loosely Joined: Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control” that I am doing with colleagues Brian Lamb and D’Arcy Norman. Here I will talk a bit about what we have in […] ➡
- Feed2JS: A Few More Tweaks and WordPress Date Woes Thanks for the comments that have helped identify some minor and not so minor issues with our new Feed to Javascript site. See below for updates! Some updates for folks that have implemented their own versions of this: A few early versions had a typo where the MAGPIE_CACHE_DIR was defined (it said MAGPIE_DIR). Most problems […] ➡
- Find Out Who You Really Are: The Vanity of Googlism Tired: Doing a google on your own name. Wired: Reading a Googlism on your own name. Expired: Looking up your name in a phone book. What is Googlism? The best why to find out is to explore, but more or less, it uses the “collective” wisdom of the Google API to extract a list of […] ➡
- 2003
- Beginnings of the blogShop This is the start of our online workshop, or “blogshop” for showing faculty at our colleges a little bit about weblogs, and to get them started using MovableType. It should ba a grand adventure! Share this barking on social media ➡
// 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.
