For as long as I’ve had my books I’ve read page up, I wasn’t entirely happy with it. So I decided to change the implementation to Jamie Rubin’s Shortcode method. Which was what my other method was based on anyway.
I learned how to create a child theme for WordPress so my changes wouldn’t get wiped out the next time the theme was updated. I downloaded the function.php file into it and pointed it at my Dropbox book list.
All was going well except I had an extra parenthesis on all the dates.
Example: This Could Help by Patrick Rhone (1/20/2015))
The last item on the list was missing its trailing parenthesis.
Example: This Could Help by Patrick Rhone (1/20/2015
Since I don’t speak code, I went looking for help from nerds greater than myself. They suggested two changes to make to the code and it worked perfectly.
Tony Giunta suggested changing line 21.
Original: $date = substr($second_part[1],0,-1);
Change: $date = $second_part[1];
Nick Wynja suggested changing line 54.
Original: echo "<li>$title by $author ($date)</li>\n";
Change: echo "<li>$title by $author ($date</li>\n";
I am not a coder. They both commented on the quality of the code. I’m sure these changes (and all of this code) could have been written better and I’m sure lots of people have solutions and versions they’d tout as being superior. But this works for me, and with their help I was able to get it working in my WordPress setup.
Here is my changed version on Github.