“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 10 posts previously published on March 25th
- 2023
- End of 14 Year Aperture Strategy Run: the Flickr API Made Me Do It Against all common wisdom, I have been running an old operating system (10.14.6 Mojave) on my old MacBookPro (2103) to mainly use the photo management software Apple dropped in 2015 (Aperture). Yes, newer software is out there, and I have access to Lightroom via my Adobe plan I pay through the month for to get […]
- 2022
- 6x6x3 Me and The Unevenly Distributed Now Hah! I was not only off by 1 in my opening for Write 6×6 I somehow missed last week, being this thing called “Spring Break” was a bonus week (?). According to the Writing Ideas page, this is week 2, so I am off by one ahead. Do I stop? Shrug, rules need not apply […]
- 2016
- In Who? Our Data We Trust? / My Ex’s Zip Disk Files Call me easily distracted. Yesterday I was filing some papers (yes I have papers) in a filing cabinet (ditto, 2 small drawers). I noted an old one in the back, a bunch of paperwork from my sabbatical in 2000 while at the Maricopa Community Colleges. This will be a future post, but I was hoping […]
- Hello / Goodbye iPhone I am getting rid of my iPhone. No, this is not an Apple rant. Heck, my phone feels very secure these days (pffffttt FPI). I adore my sleek iPhone6s — the one I am getting rid of is a twice cracked screen iPhone5. That is the phone I bought in December 2012 after returning home […]
- 2012
- Writing on the Web / Writing For the Web cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by woodleywonderworks Hypertext the Lingua Franca of the Internet The Web wouldn’t be there if Tim Berners-Lee did not design webbrowser and webserver software, invented HTTP and defined URL. Also not less important if his bosses of CERN wouldn’t have had the insight of allowing to have […]
- 2007
- Adios to NIPSA Scarlet letter From Flickr (but wither simplicity?) It’s been almost a year since I had a bone to pick with flickr regarding their less visibly known process of stamping accounts consisting of their definition of screenshots as NIPSA (Not In Public Service Area) (the whole story is serialized.) The issue for me was I had set up a pro account to house […]
- 2005
- More Frivolous Fun: Spelling with Flickr More fun with dynamic graphics, of no certain putpose. Spell With Flickr rummages through the vast supply of flickr photos of letters so you can create a dynamic generate spelled out version of any word, e.g here might be my new logo: If you do not like the looks of any letter, just click on […]
- 2004
- The Serendipitic Web: Google Defines to Biff to A Fallen Tomahwak Forgot the semantic web, I have bumped into (again) the serendipitic web, the place you find things not be slick relationships, but just blind, frivolous stumbling. My RSS feed pile led me to James Farmer’s pleased post of stumbling Google into what he liked as a definition of RSS. While James got there my a […]
- Thanks Elise for Learning MT Tips Woo-hoo! Elise’s Learning Movable Type blog has a fantastic set of useful tips, template tweaks, etc, a;; cleanly explained and illustrated for the MovableType blog crowd. I just spent an hour fixing up some CogDogBlog issues that escaped notice or care, thanks to Elise. Problems with Default Style Templates took care of a number of […]
- MLX Package of the Week: No Fear of Databases Another task that has had its wheels fallen off was my plan to highlight different Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) packages of merit. We should be ramping up the loading dock, as we are nearing in the last week of our “Great MLX Package Race” incentive program (offering software prizes for college and individual contributions). But […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 10 posts previously published on March 25th
- 2023
- End of 14 Year Aperture Strategy Run: the Flickr API Made Me Do It Against all common wisdom, I have been running an old operating system (10.14.6 Mojave) on my old MacBookPro (2103) to mainly use the photo management software Apple dropped in 2015 (Aperture). Yes, newer software is out there, and I have access to Lightroom via my Adobe plan I pay through the month for to get […] ➡
- 2022
- 6x6x3 Me and The Unevenly Distributed Now Hah! I was not only off by 1 in my opening for Write 6×6 I somehow missed last week, being this thing called “Spring Break” was a bonus week (?). According to the Writing Ideas page, this is week 2, so I am off by one ahead. Do I stop? Shrug, rules need not apply […] ➡
- 2016
- In Who? Our Data We Trust? / My Ex’s Zip Disk Files Call me easily distracted. Yesterday I was filing some papers (yes I have papers) in a filing cabinet (ditto, 2 small drawers). I noted an old one in the back, a bunch of paperwork from my sabbatical in 2000 while at the Maricopa Community Colleges. This will be a future post, but I was hoping […] ➡
- Hello / Goodbye iPhone I am getting rid of my iPhone. No, this is not an Apple rant. Heck, my phone feels very secure these days (pffffttt FPI). I adore my sleek iPhone6s — the one I am getting rid of is a twice cracked screen iPhone5. That is the phone I bought in December 2012 after returning home […] ➡
- 2012
- Writing on the Web / Writing For the Web cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by woodleywonderworks Hypertext the Lingua Franca of the Internet The Web wouldn’t be there if Tim Berners-Lee did not design webbrowser and webserver software, invented HTTP and defined URL. Also not less important if his bosses of CERN wouldn’t have had the insight of allowing to have […] ➡
- 2007
- 2005
- More Frivolous Fun: Spelling with Flickr More fun with dynamic graphics, of no certain putpose. Spell With Flickr rummages through the vast supply of flickr photos of letters so you can create a dynamic generate spelled out version of any word, e.g here might be my new logo: If you do not like the looks of any letter, just click on […] ➡
- 2004
- The Serendipitic Web: Google Defines to Biff to A Fallen Tomahwak Forgot the semantic web, I have bumped into (again) the serendipitic web, the place you find things not be slick relationships, but just blind, frivolous stumbling. My RSS feed pile led me to James Farmer’s pleased post of stumbling Google into what he liked as a definition of RSS. While James got there my a […] ➡
- Thanks Elise for Learning MT Tips Woo-hoo! Elise’s Learning Movable Type blog has a fantastic set of useful tips, template tweaks, etc, a;; cleanly explained and illustrated for the MovableType blog crowd. I just spent an hour fixing up some CogDogBlog issues that escaped notice or care, thanks to Elise. Problems with Default Style Templates took care of a number of […] ➡
- MLX Package of the Week: No Fear of Databases Another task that has had its wheels fallen off was my plan to highlight different Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) packages of merit. We should be ramping up the loading dock, as we are nearing in the last week of our “Great MLX Package Race” incentive program (offering software prizes for college and individual contributions). But […] ➡
// 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.
