CogDogBlog Now With Authentic Seals of Sarcasm

I’ve noticed a few blogs I see in my RSS reader continually have something at the bottom of their posts like:

This post ‘CogDogBlog Now With Authentic Seals of Sarcasm’ was originally published at CogDogBlog on February 20, 2016

My first thought was “duh” I am reading your blog, but have guessed people are doing this to clarify and source/originally if some other person/gnome/entity republishes their posts elsewhere. It’s a sort of Seal of Authenticity.

For some reason, my mind started wondering about doing something like this with a bit more dose of …. sarcasm.

It also gave me a chance to toy with some basic WordPress judo — using a filter on the_content, which is a way to modify the content of a post anytime it is called to make it display- e.g. in the post itself, but also in the RSS Feed, anywhere the full content is displayed.

It’s pretty easy to do. But because I like random(), I decided to make it a bit snarkier by having the words changed each time some random post is loaded…

or on reload

For now this is just coded into my child theme’s custom functions, but could also be done with the My Functions plugin I recently discovered. I cannot imagine anyone every wanting such a thing, but if I wanted to be ambitious I could make it a plugin with some kind of options screen to edit your won sarcastic phrases.

// content filter to modify post content
add_filter( 'the_content', 'cdb_post_footer_smartass' );

// finction to add a smart ass seal of authenticity to all posts
function cdb_post_footer_smartass( $content ) {

	// an array of strings for the random verb phrases, always start with a past
	// tens of an action verb
	$smarties = array('dropped like a smoking hot potato', 'assembled from spare parts of a 1957 Chevy', 'squeezed out of the bottom of an old rusted tube of toothpaste', 'scraped from the bottom of the pickel barrel', 'zapped with 10,000 volts and declared "It\'s ALIVE" by Dr. Frankenstein', 'pushed out of the bottom of a purple jar of Play-Doh ', 'cracked open and scrambled from a rotten egg',  'emerged from the primordial ooze and first walked on land', 'thawed from a previous ice age and melted', 'pulled from under moldy cheese at the back of the fridge', 'rescued from the bottom of a stangant pond', 'pulled charred and crispy from a smoky charred oven', 'yanked out of the teeth of a rabid chicken', 'slapped on the butt by a cigar smoking doctor yelling "It\'s a post!"', 'pulled like taffy through a needle\'s eye' );

	// append to the content, yuck hard coded styles, sue me
	// Use get_post_type() to differentiate between pages and posts
	// Put hypelink on title followed with a random phrase
	// followed by name of blog, podt URL, and published date
    $content .= '
The ' . get_post_type()  . ' "' . get_the_title() . '" was originally ' . $smarties[array_rand($smarties)] .  ' at ' . get_bloginfo() .  ' (' .  get_permalink()  . ') on ' . get_the_date() .  '.
' ;

	// send it down stream!
    return $content;
}

Changing the phrases is an exercise left to the student, or just taking out the whole array thing and make it a normal “This post was originally published….”

!= rocket science

I also realized my “Random” link on the menu bar did not work. The old method of adding ?random to the blog URL seemed to know just pull pages and not posts. I want a link to go to a random post, damnit!

That’s easy, I have a method I use all over the place. Sure there are plugins, but where about the satisfaction of putting the blog on the rack and doing it myself?

So I create a template in my theme called page-random.php and inside of it I put:

 'post',
    'post_status' => 'publish',
    'posts_per_page' => 1,
    'orderby' => 'rand'
);

// run query run
$my_random_post = new WP_Query ( $args );

while ( $my_random_post->have_posts () ) {
  $my_random_post->the_post ();
  
  // It's time! Go someplace random, have a great time
  wp_redirect ( get_permalink () );
  exit;
}
?>

The nice thing here I don’t have to match any theme page formatting since I am never showing anything. My template does a custom query on WordPress to get one published post, chosen at random, then I just do a re-direct to go to the URL of whatever post was returned.

Then all I need to do is create a page with the name Random. It needs no content, its a place holder.

Now I have a link http://cogdogblog.com/random that redirects me to any of 4,572 posts inside the dog house.

Hours of entertainment. And now each one has a random footer stamp of sarcastic authenticity. With 16 different random phrases, that’s like 70,000 possible combinations.

Wowza. Yowza.

Someone told me when I was 17 (because my sense of humor now has not evolved much beyond), “Alan you like sarcasm… do you know it comes from the Greek word ‘to cut flesh’?”

Lacking at that time an internet nor the mobile device to google it, all I could is reply with some line about the sharpness of Ginsu knives.

So now I can google it

CogDogBlog sarkazein-ing the web since 2003!

Just scroll on down and see what you get…

Top / Featured Image: I was hoping for some kind of stamp of “officialness” but failed to get close by searching Google Images (limited to licensed for reuse) on “official stamp” (too many postal stamps), “official seal” (to many graphic badges, frigging badges), and found this one searching on “old seal”. This image is a Gniezno seal from 14th century Poland. Good on ya, Gniezno!

Public domain image (sort of, all kinds of verbiage about different countries) By Unknown; original uploader was Kpjas at pl.wikipedia [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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