“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 12 posts previously published on October 8th
- 2020
- Got Four (barely) Now I am in the trap of my own making. I am going to post (if I do not fall over asleep) the top image from the batch (well maybe four photos) I just heaved on to flickr. It was a light load today, the photos only from an 11:30 am dog walk across the […]
- 2019
- Another Metaphor Generator, Perchance? Not that this was necessary. The edtech metaphor making for Martin Weller had completely run its course (and the great John Johnston sharing a way to feed it via a Google spreadsheet), yet I am still tinkering. Today happened just because I was cleaning out old unread email, and found a link I had emailed […]
- 2017
- Riding the Open Web in My Workshop Can Be a Wild Ride That was me a few days ago being tossed from my workshop demo at DML. Wednesday was the 2017 DML pre-conference workshop Staking Your Claim: How the Open Web is Won for Teaching & Learning I did with Kim Jaxon, who had zero hesitation with my goofy western metaphors. This was a second round from […]
- 2014
- 2014 Kiwi Tour: University of Waikato creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Yes, praise be the Flat White coffee. When I arrived in New Zealand my first trip in 2000, jet lagged like a wet dog, I lurched into a coffee shop and asked for a coffee. When they asked me what kind of coffee I […]
- 2012
- Where’s Dave? There are the paths of links that maketh up the web and then the paths of experience that make up another web. Sometimes it just gets tangled up in a ball of serendipity that really is not all that important in the long run, yet still tickles me. Today’s ds106 Daily Create was contributed by […]
- Honoring #mooctober Muzzled. Self. @cogdog – you up for forswearing #mooc blogging for the whole month? #mooctober — David Kernohan (@dkernohan) October 8, 2012 Why? There’s plenty of other things to blog about. Plenty. Share this barking on social media
- 2011
- Bad Baby Macguffin In checking out some of the student visual design work for ds106 (which the CUNY students are really going far and powerful with), I could not resist one more Macguffin. A better real estate decision could have avoided dealing with that whole building full of freaks. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ogfqfnt2Aaw Thinking again on the idea of a regular […]
- 2010
- Take That, Phileas Fogg modified from Wikimedia Commons public domain image I am not blogging about not blogging about not blogging… but dangerously close seeing the last post dated September 30. Last night I closed had my two week round the world loop, and yes, some 140 years later, I have some speed advantages over Mr Fogg, who to […]
- 2008
- Flickr Photo in Museum That’s My Photo!! by cogdogblog posted 8 Oct ’08, 2.33am MDT PST on flickr A new round of self back-patting! One of my flickr photos is part of a museum exhibit… I got a flickr email request a few weeks back from a designer who asked to use one of my photos in part of […]
- 2004
- Internet Scout Spots Our FlipSite Their vision is far and reaching at the Internet Scout– I’ve been getting their reviews of web sites for at least 5 years. I just got a notice that they recently featured a blurb on one of our sites, the Interactive FlipSite— this made me laugh since I think we created this in 1998, most […]
- 2003
- Tables Turned: CDB bites back at blog-spam Wahoo! Thanks to the clear details from Jay Allen, Killing Comment Spam Dead, in relation to an earlier yelp, it looks like we are flipping the score on comment-blog-spam. It wa snot too much work to download and install 3 MT plug-ins and modify the various MT templates. There is a small but not painful […]
- Blog-Spammers:10, Me:0 I give up. The rate of blog comment spam to this site is bothersome, now with 10 banned IPs (which likely does very little), and going in to remove the comments manually is getting very old. The latest, unrelated, un-meaningful, unwanted, undesired, unethical, un-freakin’ stooooopid crap that arrived in my comments: IP Address: 219.184.4.154 Name: […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 12 posts previously published on October 8th
- 2020
- Got Four (barely) Now I am in the trap of my own making. I am going to post (if I do not fall over asleep) the top image from the batch (well maybe four photos) I just heaved on to flickr. It was a light load today, the photos only from an 11:30 am dog walk across the […] ➡
- 2019
- Another Metaphor Generator, Perchance? Not that this was necessary. The edtech metaphor making for Martin Weller had completely run its course (and the great John Johnston sharing a way to feed it via a Google spreadsheet), yet I am still tinkering. Today happened just because I was cleaning out old unread email, and found a link I had emailed […] ➡
- 2017
- Riding the Open Web in My Workshop Can Be a Wild Ride That was me a few days ago being tossed from my workshop demo at DML. Wednesday was the 2017 DML pre-conference workshop Staking Your Claim: How the Open Web is Won for Teaching & Learning I did with Kim Jaxon, who had zero hesitation with my goofy western metaphors. This was a second round from […] ➡
- 2014
- 2014 Kiwi Tour: University of Waikato creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Yes, praise be the Flat White coffee. When I arrived in New Zealand my first trip in 2000, jet lagged like a wet dog, I lurched into a coffee shop and asked for a coffee. When they asked me what kind of coffee I […] ➡
- 2012
- Where’s Dave? There are the paths of links that maketh up the web and then the paths of experience that make up another web. Sometimes it just gets tangled up in a ball of serendipity that really is not all that important in the long run, yet still tickles me. Today’s ds106 Daily Create was contributed by […] ➡
- Honoring #mooctober Muzzled. Self. @cogdog – you up for forswearing #mooc blogging for the whole month? #mooctober — David Kernohan (@dkernohan) October 8, 2012 Why? There’s plenty of other things to blog about. Plenty. Share this barking on social media ➡
- 2011
- Bad Baby Macguffin In checking out some of the student visual design work for ds106 (which the CUNY students are really going far and powerful with), I could not resist one more Macguffin. A better real estate decision could have avoided dealing with that whole building full of freaks. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ogfqfnt2Aaw Thinking again on the idea of a regular […] ➡
- 2010
- Take That, Phileas Fogg modified from Wikimedia Commons public domain image I am not blogging about not blogging about not blogging… but dangerously close seeing the last post dated September 30. Last night I closed had my two week round the world loop, and yes, some 140 years later, I have some speed advantages over Mr Fogg, who to […] ➡
- 2008
- Flickr Photo in Museum That’s My Photo!! by cogdogblog posted 8 Oct ’08, 2.33am MDT PST on flickr A new round of self back-patting! One of my flickr photos is part of a museum exhibit… I got a flickr email request a few weeks back from a designer who asked to use one of my photos in part of […] ➡
- 2004
- Internet Scout Spots Our FlipSite Their vision is far and reaching at the Internet Scout– I’ve been getting their reviews of web sites for at least 5 years. I just got a notice that they recently featured a blurb on one of our sites, the Interactive FlipSite— this made me laugh since I think we created this in 1998, most […] ➡
- 2003
- Tables Turned: CDB bites back at blog-spam Wahoo! Thanks to the clear details from Jay Allen, Killing Comment Spam Dead, in relation to an earlier yelp, it looks like we are flipping the score on comment-blog-spam. It wa snot too much work to download and install 3 MT plug-ins and modify the various MT templates. There is a small but not painful […] ➡
- Blog-Spammers:10, Me:0 I give up. The rate of blog comment spam to this site is bothersome, now with 10 banned IPs (which likely does very little), and going in to remove the comments manually is getting very old. The latest, unrelated, un-meaningful, unwanted, undesired, unethical, un-freakin’ stooooopid crap that arrived in my comments: IP Address: 219.184.4.154 Name: […] ➡
// 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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