“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 9 posts previously published on April 30th
- 2015
- Propelling a Course By Something Other than Content My “involvement” in #rhizo15 is pretty much listening to the tea leaves in twitter, today’s bits had a fair bit of rumbling about “Content is People!” When I read Simon’s post I really had expectations of a DEVO song. But in reading/watching Dave’s question about the Myth of Content, the “people are content” thing is […]
- Pechaflickr is My Favorite Web Toy That dog in the photo? I don’t know her, but according to the flickr author, Rosie has a respectable life philosophy: Rosie says keep trying your best – it’s fun! Speaking of fun and trying to be best, maybe the thing I made that I am most proud of is my flickr improv tool pechaflickr– […]
- 2014
- 2013
- MOOC Fiction I dream of some magic hack that retweets this classic from Audrey Watters every time someone tweets/blogs/farts about MOOCs https://twitter.com/audreywatters/status/314119610851008512 We need more Jules. I am but a weak imitation, but over lunch could not rest (and actually forgot to eat lunch) to spin out some MOOC FiCTION “What does the future of education look […]
- 2012
- Slice 14: Skipping Class cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by SabrinaDan Photo Oi. I dropped the ball of my slices of life audio reflections– slice 14 here is almost 2 months old! I did get up to slice 20, so ahve some posts back logged, given that my ds106 semester will end this week. […]
- 2011
- Piles cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Alissa Osumi Expectations keep piling up in the apartment of my mind Like piles of someone elses dirty clothes. Dirty jeans, socks in odd numbered collections, flannel shirts, a polka dotted party dress (not mine), torn jeans, a tuxedo (no way), a leisure suit […]
- 2007
- Ultimate Delicious Tagger Modified my own flickr photo! I’ve been madly tagging sites on delicious for at least 2 or 3 years now, and rely on it solely as my web resource collection. For a long while I used as a tool a version of the bookmarklet tool I had rigged into my bookmarklet tool maker (wow there […]
- 2004
- Civic Responsibility Dialogue Day: Direct Pipeline into the MLX Here is an example of how we are tying events, projects into the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX), and using syndication technology to provide a service. Today is yet another of our Dialogue Days, one day topical faculty development activities– Civic Responsibility: From Awareness to Commitment: Share this barking on social media
- 2003
- Google of the Week (google**10) This week’s newest set of googled links are to variety of sites that make great use of visuals to further the understanding of scales of magnitude, some great educational resources lie within… Share this barking on social media
On Michael’s site he might use There are 9 posts previously published on April 30th
- 2015
- Propelling a Course By Something Other than Content My “involvement” in #rhizo15 is pretty much listening to the tea leaves in twitter, today’s bits had a fair bit of rumbling about “Content is People!” When I read Simon’s post I really had expectations of a DEVO song. But in reading/watching Dave’s question about the Myth of Content, the “people are content” thing is […] ➡
- Pechaflickr is My Favorite Web Toy That dog in the photo? I don’t know her, but according to the flickr author, Rosie has a respectable life philosophy: Rosie says keep trying your best – it’s fun! Speaking of fun and trying to be best, maybe the thing I made that I am most proud of is my flickr improv tool pechaflickr– […] ➡
- 2014
- 2013
- MOOC Fiction I dream of some magic hack that retweets this classic from Audrey Watters every time someone tweets/blogs/farts about MOOCs https://twitter.com/audreywatters/status/314119610851008512 We need more Jules. I am but a weak imitation, but over lunch could not rest (and actually forgot to eat lunch) to spin out some MOOC FiCTION “What does the future of education look […] ➡
- 2012
- Slice 14: Skipping Class cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by SabrinaDan Photo Oi. I dropped the ball of my slices of life audio reflections– slice 14 here is almost 2 months old! I did get up to slice 20, so ahve some posts back logged, given that my ds106 semester will end this week. […] ➡
- 2011
- Piles cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Alissa Osumi Expectations keep piling up in the apartment of my mind Like piles of someone elses dirty clothes. Dirty jeans, socks in odd numbered collections, flannel shirts, a polka dotted party dress (not mine), torn jeans, a tuxedo (no way), a leisure suit […] ➡
- 2007
- Ultimate Delicious Tagger Modified my own flickr photo! I’ve been madly tagging sites on delicious for at least 2 or 3 years now, and rely on it solely as my web resource collection. For a long while I used as a tool a version of the bookmarklet tool I had rigged into my bookmarklet tool maker (wow there […] ➡
- 2004
- Civic Responsibility Dialogue Day: Direct Pipeline into the MLX Here is an example of how we are tying events, projects into the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX), and using syndication technology to provide a service. Today is yet another of our Dialogue Days, one day topical faculty development activities– Civic Responsibility: From Awareness to Commitment: Share this barking on social media ➡
- 2003
- Google of the Week (google**10) This week’s newest set of googled links are to variety of sites that make great use of visuals to further the understanding of scales of magnitude, some great educational resources lie within… 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.
