“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 24 posts previously published on September 30th
- 2024
- The Power of Creating / Maintaining Your Own Links Could there really be a world wide web without hyperlinks? To me, the most durable, valuable, and potentially serendipity laced magic ones are made and managed by an individual. All those “posts” tossed into LinkedIn, The Platform I Will Only Call Twitter, the One I don’t Use That has a face and a book in […]
- 2023
- Domains Come and Go (and sometimes come back again) I never would say that Domains of Ones Own (DoOO) has quote/unquote died, but certainly it’s post peak witnessing the withering of blog posting in lieu substacking and the reach for Google Docs more than anointing a web site. Like many who cling to a few, I have to glance at the pack of 10+ […]
- 2017
- Take a SPLOT Test Drive or… Instant SPLOT? Are SPLOTs becoming a thing? Spotted this tweet this morning… I'm thinking to use TRU Writer SPLOT by @cogdog for #openmed learning logs. Thx @jimgroom @villaronrubia for the healthy food for thoughts! — Cristina Stefanelli (@cri_ste) September 30, 2017 I’m thinking about this kind of request as I get stuff ready for the Staking Your […]
- 2015
- Giddyup for Western106! Howdy! There’s gonna be a ds106 full of western stories and movies that I will be teaching next Spring for Kansas State University. Bill Genereux has been a long time ds106 partner in teaching a Kansas State University course on digital storytelling that he has hitched his wagon to the DS106 horse. He offered me […]
- 2014
- An Extra Large @medium Response creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-ND ) flickr photo shared by Tracy Lee After a bit of a rant posted on medium how medium’s rss feeds are messed up, I was pleased to see the post published there getting probably ore recommends than anything else I published there. Not that’s what I aim for. But I […]
- 2013
- MADNESS! MADNESS! Travel Until this past weekend, my previous travel trip was way back in June. It’s been so nice being home for a long stretch… so much I pinned together a five week travel trip starting Sunday. Remind me to ask myself what I was thinking? This is roughly the plan, i started fiddling with Google maps […]
- 2012
- Card Carrying Utopian modified from graphic generated at http://namegenerator.in/arizona WHat’s in your wallet? I’ve spent a few days reflecting, rehashing, or maybe just recycling something that happened last week. It’s given me some pause, yet given that my position is to use my blog as a place to work out ideas, I;m walking the dog. (My new motto […]
- Last Dog Friday was 9 years since I owned a dog, making this her named blog a tad hypocritical. Friday marked the day I had Mickey put down, and maybe have never full resolved how such a sweetheart of a dog to people turned out to be violently agressive to other dogs. Or what that said about […]
- We Found Your Camera On The Train One of my favorite all time web-based stories (I credit Bryan Alexander for introducing me to this) is I Found a Camera in the Woods. originally posted to a discussion board, it reveals exactly what the title says- including a series of photos on the found camera that sequentially play out a story in images, […]
- 2010
- This is Virtual Worlds cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Actually not, but bear with some metaphor swinging from the opposite end of the globe. I’m halfway through a round the world trip for a series of NMC meetings. In the past week, we have run two meetings related to the work of the Horizon Project’s Australia-New Zealand […]
- 2009
- Man You Gotta Try This Wave cc licensed flickr photo shared by star5112 Wow, I feel so horrible for all the millions of people who have not gotten their Google Wave invite, wow are you missing out on the coolest experience since glow in the dark yo-yos… Ring-Dings…disco… Even in just a few hours, I am finding my every conception of […]
- 2008
- Next Adventure I’m not even home yet from the CogDogBlog Asia tour and I am remotely buying tickets for a new adventure in November. A few weeks ago a friend sent me an email from someone he knew who needed someone to house sit and watch their dog for a month. Ahhh, not any house, but this […]
- New Camera Photos Old First Picture with New Camera by cogdogblog posted 30 Sep ’08, 9.10am MDT PST on flickr Here is the first photo taken with my new Canon IXY 3000IS, purchased in Japan– the subject is the camera it is replacing. The new max image size is 4416×3312 pixels, quite a jump from the SD800. From the […]
- My Inbox Reeks of Stinky Tofu On his custom tour of Shanghai a few weeks back, Jeff Utecht provided sufficient warning to be wary of “Stinky Tofu” on sale in the streets. I never had the pleasure there, but cleaning out the email inbox brings up similar thoughts. A few weeks ago I dutifully ignored and filed in the unwanted trash […]
- 2007
- What a Deal for my DeadPod What a Deal for my DeadPod posted 30 Sep ’07, 11.06am MDT PST on flickr I liked the concept of BuyMyBrokeniPod: We offer a fast, simple, and eco-friendly way for you to get money for used, new or broken iPods and iPhones. We accept Classic, Touch, Video, Photo, Nano, Mini, iPhones & Generation 4 to […]
- New Form of Link Farm Spam – Lonely Girl Blogs Link spammers never sleep. They are hard at work breaking around the edges of our futile efforts to keep ’em at bay. And now they are getting harder to sniff out at first glance in the moderation queue, as they clothe their efforts in false fronts, which, if like an old wester ghost town, when […]
- 2005
- What’s That Smell? Is it My LinkRank? I gotta stop blogging and do some work… but then Stephen Downes has to share this nifty tool from PubSub– LinkRank: LinkRanks are our way of measuring the strength, persistence, and vitality of links appearing in sites that syndicate their content. When PubSub reads an entry from a syndication feed, it takes note of any […]
- Lost Navihedra While thinking/writing today about visual navigation schemes, I transported back to the late 1990s when the brilliant multimedia visionary Roy Stringer was coming up with a 3D, manipulative tool called a “Navihedron”, then coded in Macromedia Shockwave. You see this in some modern iterations, especially the Visual Thesaurus, where words become nodes, and are connected […]
- Woogle Words Woogle uses Google Image search to turn phrases into pictures: Woogle is a search toy based on the ever popular Google Image Search. It creates image messages out of the words in the phrase you entered. The URLs are obfuscated so that you can pass them to your friends without them being able to read […]
- Liveplasma Pop Culture Mapping I’ve been asking around in come email circles for any leads in software that might allow a mortal faculty member and his/her students to create 3D mind/concept maps… One reply was not relevant, but shared the link to Liveplasma a rather interesting social software / music+movies connection mapping web application. I only played with it […]
- Flickr Upload Bookmarklet For some unknown reason, I was cleaning up my browser bookmark tools. I cannot even remember where I found this, but I had forgotten about one that grabs images from any web page in view, and allows you to then upload any of them to your own flickr account. Going beyond the knee jerk fear/reaction […]
- Northern Voice / Southern Jackalope As a Canadian wanna-be, I’ve jumped early to register for the Feb 10-11, 2006 Northern Voice conference in Vancouver. This definitely fits the bill of an active, not-a-lecture-format conference as opposed to the other edtech fetes that just bore me into a coma. I was envious to only read of last year’s first offering. I […]
- 2003
- Who is Biff Cantrell? According to the pre-eminent source, there are only 10 known web sightings of the myterious person who calls himself “Biff Cantrell” (Google for “Biff Cantrell”). How come his home address is unknown? All messages sent to biff@zippy.com are bounced back? Does anyone know Biff? Seen him? Please have him call home. Share this barking on […]
- The MLX Great Race Ends Tonight Our iincentive program for getting people in our system to contribute items to the Maricopa Learning eXchange ends tonight at midnight (and starts up again for the next round one minute later). See more about The Great Package Race. What we are doing is tracking all items contributed over a 6 month period and awarding […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 24 posts previously published on September 30th
- 2024
- The Power of Creating / Maintaining Your Own Links Could there really be a world wide web without hyperlinks? To me, the most durable, valuable, and potentially serendipity laced magic ones are made and managed by an individual. All those “posts” tossed into LinkedIn, The Platform I Will Only Call Twitter, the One I don’t Use That has a face and a book in […] ➡
- 2023
- Domains Come and Go (and sometimes come back again) I never would say that Domains of Ones Own (DoOO) has quote/unquote died, but certainly it’s post peak witnessing the withering of blog posting in lieu substacking and the reach for Google Docs more than anointing a web site. Like many who cling to a few, I have to glance at the pack of 10+ […] ➡
- 2017
- Take a SPLOT Test Drive or… Instant SPLOT? Are SPLOTs becoming a thing? Spotted this tweet this morning… I'm thinking to use TRU Writer SPLOT by @cogdog for #openmed learning logs. Thx @jimgroom @villaronrubia for the healthy food for thoughts! — Cristina Stefanelli (@cri_ste) September 30, 2017 I’m thinking about this kind of request as I get stuff ready for the Staking Your […] ➡
- 2015
- Giddyup for Western106! Howdy! There’s gonna be a ds106 full of western stories and movies that I will be teaching next Spring for Kansas State University. Bill Genereux has been a long time ds106 partner in teaching a Kansas State University course on digital storytelling that he has hitched his wagon to the DS106 horse. He offered me […] ➡
- 2014
- An Extra Large @medium Response creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-ND ) flickr photo shared by Tracy Lee After a bit of a rant posted on medium how medium’s rss feeds are messed up, I was pleased to see the post published there getting probably ore recommends than anything else I published there. Not that’s what I aim for. But I […] ➡
- 2013
- MADNESS! MADNESS! Travel Until this past weekend, my previous travel trip was way back in June. It’s been so nice being home for a long stretch… so much I pinned together a five week travel trip starting Sunday. Remind me to ask myself what I was thinking? This is roughly the plan, i started fiddling with Google maps […] ➡
- 2012
- Card Carrying Utopian modified from graphic generated at http://namegenerator.in/arizona WHat’s in your wallet? I’ve spent a few days reflecting, rehashing, or maybe just recycling something that happened last week. It’s given me some pause, yet given that my position is to use my blog as a place to work out ideas, I;m walking the dog. (My new motto […] ➡
- Last Dog Friday was 9 years since I owned a dog, making this her named blog a tad hypocritical. Friday marked the day I had Mickey put down, and maybe have never full resolved how such a sweetheart of a dog to people turned out to be violently agressive to other dogs. Or what that said about […] ➡
- We Found Your Camera On The Train One of my favorite all time web-based stories (I credit Bryan Alexander for introducing me to this) is I Found a Camera in the Woods. originally posted to a discussion board, it reveals exactly what the title says- including a series of photos on the found camera that sequentially play out a story in images, […] ➡
- 2010
- This is Virtual Worlds cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Actually not, but bear with some metaphor swinging from the opposite end of the globe. I’m halfway through a round the world trip for a series of NMC meetings. In the past week, we have run two meetings related to the work of the Horizon Project’s Australia-New Zealand […] ➡
- 2009
- Man You Gotta Try This Wave cc licensed flickr photo shared by star5112 Wow, I feel so horrible for all the millions of people who have not gotten their Google Wave invite, wow are you missing out on the coolest experience since glow in the dark yo-yos… Ring-Dings…disco… Even in just a few hours, I am finding my every conception of […] ➡
- 2008
- Next Adventure I’m not even home yet from the CogDogBlog Asia tour and I am remotely buying tickets for a new adventure in November. A few weeks ago a friend sent me an email from someone he knew who needed someone to house sit and watch their dog for a month. Ahhh, not any house, but this […] ➡
- New Camera Photos Old First Picture with New Camera by cogdogblog posted 30 Sep ’08, 9.10am MDT PST on flickr Here is the first photo taken with my new Canon IXY 3000IS, purchased in Japan– the subject is the camera it is replacing. The new max image size is 4416×3312 pixels, quite a jump from the SD800. From the […] ➡
- My Inbox Reeks of Stinky Tofu On his custom tour of Shanghai a few weeks back, Jeff Utecht provided sufficient warning to be wary of “Stinky Tofu” on sale in the streets. I never had the pleasure there, but cleaning out the email inbox brings up similar thoughts. A few weeks ago I dutifully ignored and filed in the unwanted trash […] ➡
- 2007
- What a Deal for my DeadPod What a Deal for my DeadPod posted 30 Sep ’07, 11.06am MDT PST on flickr I liked the concept of BuyMyBrokeniPod: We offer a fast, simple, and eco-friendly way for you to get money for used, new or broken iPods and iPhones. We accept Classic, Touch, Video, Photo, Nano, Mini, iPhones & Generation 4 to […] ➡
- New Form of Link Farm Spam – Lonely Girl Blogs Link spammers never sleep. They are hard at work breaking around the edges of our futile efforts to keep ’em at bay. And now they are getting harder to sniff out at first glance in the moderation queue, as they clothe their efforts in false fronts, which, if like an old wester ghost town, when […] ➡
- 2005
- What’s That Smell? Is it My LinkRank? I gotta stop blogging and do some work… but then Stephen Downes has to share this nifty tool from PubSub– LinkRank: LinkRanks are our way of measuring the strength, persistence, and vitality of links appearing in sites that syndicate their content. When PubSub reads an entry from a syndication feed, it takes note of any […] ➡
- Lost Navihedra While thinking/writing today about visual navigation schemes, I transported back to the late 1990s when the brilliant multimedia visionary Roy Stringer was coming up with a 3D, manipulative tool called a “Navihedron”, then coded in Macromedia Shockwave. You see this in some modern iterations, especially the Visual Thesaurus, where words become nodes, and are connected […] ➡
- Woogle Words Woogle uses Google Image search to turn phrases into pictures: Woogle is a search toy based on the ever popular Google Image Search. It creates image messages out of the words in the phrase you entered. The URLs are obfuscated so that you can pass them to your friends without them being able to read […] ➡
- Liveplasma Pop Culture Mapping I’ve been asking around in come email circles for any leads in software that might allow a mortal faculty member and his/her students to create 3D mind/concept maps… One reply was not relevant, but shared the link to Liveplasma a rather interesting social software / music+movies connection mapping web application. I only played with it […] ➡
- Flickr Upload Bookmarklet For some unknown reason, I was cleaning up my browser bookmark tools. I cannot even remember where I found this, but I had forgotten about one that grabs images from any web page in view, and allows you to then upload any of them to your own flickr account. Going beyond the knee jerk fear/reaction […] ➡
- Northern Voice / Southern Jackalope As a Canadian wanna-be, I’ve jumped early to register for the Feb 10-11, 2006 Northern Voice conference in Vancouver. This definitely fits the bill of an active, not-a-lecture-format conference as opposed to the other edtech fetes that just bore me into a coma. I was envious to only read of last year’s first offering. I […] ➡
- 2003
- Who is Biff Cantrell? According to the pre-eminent source, there are only 10 known web sightings of the myterious person who calls himself “Biff Cantrell” (Google for “Biff Cantrell”). How come his home address is unknown? All messages sent to biff@zippy.com are bounced back? Does anyone know Biff? Seen him? Please have him call home. Share this barking on […] ➡
- The MLX Great Race Ends Tonight Our iincentive program for getting people in our system to contribute items to the Maricopa Learning eXchange ends tonight at midnight (and starts up again for the next round one minute later). See more about The Great Package Race. What we are doing is tracking all items contributed over a 6 month period and awarding […] ➡
// 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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