Ok to Cross the Streams When Code Fixing

“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

Thanks to my On This Day page (thanks to @cogdog for that), I found my review of 2006: https://t.co/bsjJWahYlG (https://t.co/GQky8Cpz10)
— john johnston (@johnjohnston) December 29, 2019

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.

Red arrow points to missing number where the page output reads "There are posts previously published on December 29th"

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.

https://twitter.com/djwudi/status/1212871226953101313

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 13 posts previously published on June 26th

2024Be / Between the Cacti I have a thing for cactuses… grammatically I ought to say “cacti” but that always sounds high brow. What did I know of them as a kid growing up in Baltimore? Nada. Maybe as cartoon scenery in Road Runner cartoons, and cliché background props of western movies. Here at our acreage in Saskatchewan, in the […]
2022Sodaphonic Audio now inside SPLOTbox It was about time I did some feature adding to a SPLOT theme- adding support for Sodaphonic audio was super easy for many reasons. For all that is not great about time spent in Twitter (believe it or not I have dialed my attention there back) I have to give credit that I still sift […]
2019Writer SPLOT: Escape from the WordPress Theme It’s a work in progress, but check out this version of the TRU Writer SPLOT that is no longer tied to the original’s Radcliffe theme (hit the write menu item to try it). All SPLOTs are single purpose tools, most built as WordPress themes stuffed with custom functionality… technically they are child themes that utilize […]
2017Splashing Around With Licenses Maybe you missed the kerfuffle. As kerfuffles should be missed. Unsplash dropped their use of CC0 on all those gorgeous photos on their site then Creative Commons fired back in response. This is a classic example of what I was trying to argue / suggest about so much focus on the opposite end of Creative […]
2013Digging Digg When Google announced their stupid lame country marrying your cousin backward decision to axe Google Reader there was a mad frenzy to find the next replacement– Pulse! Old Reader! Feedly! NewsBlur! AOL (???WTF) FlipBoard! I made a clear decision. Do nothing. It was March, there was a ton of time to wait for the dust […] MOOC Shaker: Totally Subdomained The latest MOOCs announced not doing it for you? Well, you can shake and stir up a new one at http://mooc.cogdogblog.com. It all started with a tweet question by Audrey Watters https://twitter.com/audreywatters/status/349623689488240640 Seriously, if The Rash of Khan is doing it, this is the enlightened way. For was we all accredibly know, he is “The […]
2011Looping Around Mountains cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I am still based on my friend’s place in Paonia, Colorado, but took today as a day trip on the scenic West Elk bypass- the first part was most glorious, a sometimes rough gravel road that climbed through aspen forests, crossed Kebler pass, and dumped […] Out Here cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Just a quick post, cause there is stuff to see today. I’ve been out on the road 3 days now, and am feeling that separation from the life I knew so well before, disappearing into the clouds of not knowing what comes next. I described […]
2010LearnMobs? DoShops? cc licensed flickr photo shared by JoseJose I read this morning via Shareable about a growing movement called “Crop Mobs” – rather sounding as much like barn raising, it speaks to people with a shared interest doing things as groups rather than isolated individuals. As described in Shareable…. In the fall of 2008 a group […] Late Night Code Frenzy Flickr CC Attribution Helper Updated It was an all day journey to get home from Canada (Edmonton to Minneapolis to Phoenix by plane, then drive to Strawberry), and after dumping the bags and shredding the junk mail, I got distracted. Two hours later, I realized it was late. But if you have not heard, flickr has a preview of a […]
2007Twitter Friends, Followers, Ratios This will prove I am not a statistician.. but I was mildly wondering today about patterns among people who twitter, as I glanced at my friends, as well as random people on the public timeline and the number of friends and followers on their pages. It seems there might be some behavior patterns there. Some […]
2006Calendar Googling Perhaps we should be speaking about things moving “at the speed of the web”…. go away from a web based tool/service for a week or more, and you may have missed 3 new versions or 40 new features. No I am not complaining (I like the chaos), just observing from a floating raft in the […]
2003Writing RSS 1-2-3 Scott at EdTechPost recently blogged about a desire for an RSS feed from the Low Threshold Applications site, a collection of how-tos for teachers, designed to be powerful tasks they can do with a minimum of fuss. The LTA site is one of those ideal for RSS-ifying: there is a regular format of content, updated […]

and the default value, the link at the end is invisible.

On Michael’s site he might use

There are 13 posts previously published on June 26th

2024Be / Between the Cacti I have a thing for cactuses… grammatically I ought to say “cacti” but that always sounds high brow. What did I know of them as a kid growing up in Baltimore? Nada. Maybe as cartoon scenery in Road Runner cartoons, and cliché background props of western movies. Here at our acreage in Saskatchewan, in the […] &amp#x27A1;
2022Sodaphonic Audio now inside SPLOTbox It was about time I did some feature adding to a SPLOT theme- adding support for Sodaphonic audio was super easy for many reasons. For all that is not great about time spent in Twitter (believe it or not I have dialed my attention there back) I have to give credit that I still sift […] &amp#x27A1;
2019Writer SPLOT: Escape from the WordPress Theme It’s a work in progress, but check out this version of the TRU Writer SPLOT that is no longer tied to the original’s Radcliffe theme (hit the write menu item to try it). All SPLOTs are single purpose tools, most built as WordPress themes stuffed with custom functionality… technically they are child themes that utilize […] &amp#x27A1;
2017Splashing Around With Licenses Maybe you missed the kerfuffle. As kerfuffles should be missed. Unsplash dropped their use of CC0 on all those gorgeous photos on their site then Creative Commons fired back in response. This is a classic example of what I was trying to argue / suggest about so much focus on the opposite end of Creative […] &amp#x27A1;
2013Digging Digg When Google announced their stupid lame country marrying your cousin backward decision to axe Google Reader there was a mad frenzy to find the next replacement– Pulse! Old Reader! Feedly! NewsBlur! AOL (???WTF) FlipBoard! I made a clear decision. Do nothing. It was March, there was a ton of time to wait for the dust […] &amp#x27A1; MOOC Shaker: Totally Subdomained The latest MOOCs announced not doing it for you? Well, you can shake and stir up a new one at http://mooc.cogdogblog.com. It all started with a tweet question by Audrey Watters https://twitter.com/audreywatters/status/349623689488240640 Seriously, if The Rash of Khan is doing it, this is the enlightened way. For was we all accredibly know, he is “The […] &amp#x27A1;
2011Looping Around Mountains cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I am still based on my friend’s place in Paonia, Colorado, but took today as a day trip on the scenic West Elk bypass- the first part was most glorious, a sometimes rough gravel road that climbed through aspen forests, crossed Kebler pass, and dumped […] &amp#x27A1; Out Here cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Just a quick post, cause there is stuff to see today. I’ve been out on the road 3 days now, and am feeling that separation from the life I knew so well before, disappearing into the clouds of not knowing what comes next. I described […] &amp#x27A1;
2010LearnMobs? DoShops? cc licensed flickr photo shared by JoseJose I read this morning via Shareable about a growing movement called “Crop Mobs” – rather sounding as much like barn raising, it speaks to people with a shared interest doing things as groups rather than isolated individuals. As described in Shareable…. In the fall of 2008 a group […] &amp#x27A1; Late Night Code Frenzy Flickr CC Attribution Helper Updated It was an all day journey to get home from Canada (Edmonton to Minneapolis to Phoenix by plane, then drive to Strawberry), and after dumping the bags and shredding the junk mail, I got distracted. Two hours later, I realized it was late. But if you have not heard, flickr has a preview of a […] &amp#x27A1;
2007Twitter Friends, Followers, Ratios This will prove I am not a statistician.. but I was mildly wondering today about patterns among people who twitter, as I glanced at my friends, as well as random people on the public timeline and the number of friends and followers on their pages. It seems there might be some behavior patterns there. Some […] &amp#x27A1;
2006Calendar Googling Perhaps we should be speaking about things moving “at the speed of the web”…. go away from a web based tool/service for a week or more, and you may have missed 3 new versions or 40 new features. No I am not complaining (I like the chaos), just observing from a floating raft in the […] &amp#x27A1;
2003Writing RSS 1-2-3 Scott at EdTechPost recently blogged about a desire for an RSS feed from the Low Threshold Applications site, a collection of how-tos for teachers, designed to be powerful tasks they can do with a minimum of fuss. The LTA site is one of those ideal for RSS-ifying: there is a regular format of content, updated […] &amp#x27A1;

to get the arrow codes he likes. This works because output for each found post looks like

// 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.