“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 11 posts previously published on September 22nd
- 2025
- From 1 to 5000 (and beyond) with the DS106 Daily Create Name a web site that you used in 2012 that has not stopped working one day right up to 2025. I’m waiting, I am patient. Hmmmm. Not coming to you? Well take the DS106 Daily Create which published its very first creative challenge, TDC1 on January 8, 2012 and yesterday, September 22, 2025 published TDC5000 […]
- 2022
- Shaping Your WordPress Tech Simply By Changing the Front Door The notion (and act) of shaping your technology1 rather than limiting yourself to what a tool provides still (or always) is resonating with me. I’m thinking about the width of the spectrum from complete control by code to almost no freedom except what a GUI provides, for me WordPress is my go to for many […]
- 2021
- A WordPress Calling Card for all my WordPress Calling Card Themes You know you have a domain of your own problem when you venture into your cpanel and find sites that you not only do not remember making, you forgot their purpose. In this case I gazed down the spiral of WordPress Theme recursion. What the bleep am I blog muttering about? It’s this subdomain of […]
- 2019
- Map Making With Leaflet.js As the second part of a series of posts about a leadership model web site created for project managed at JIBC, this one is about some of the early interface explorations I dabbled with. In the first post, I laid ground for the map metaphor for leadership, there would be three “regions” corresponding to the […]
- 2014
- When You think That Tech Is More Awesome Than Possible, yet… Flash! Poof! I thought I just discovered a hidden search gem in my OS X Mavericks system. One of the coolest things in Evernote is uploaded photos with text in the picture, becomes searchable for those words (it does some magic OCR on your images). Now that is magic. This morning I was seeking an […]
- 2012
- Sniffing the Trails of Serendipty (or if you are not linking the web you are just squatting on it) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by mccun934 I’m part of a session at next month’s Open Education Conference on Analyzing and supporting interaction in complex scenarios: the case of DS106 thatb was suggested by Julià Minguillón and also […]
- 2009
- Dead Blog Dog cc licensed flickr photo shared by Carplips I have had a hair tearing hacked WordPress blog experience here over the last 2 days. I don’t know why, but it really knocked my knees out, and I am reeling to figure out why this has gotten to me on an emotional level. That even sounds silly […]
- 2005
- Adios I am going offline for a few days to hibernate and do nothing computer related in Puerto Penasco or how us gringos say it, “Rocky Point”, returning Monday, Sept 26. Adios! Mucho gusto! Share this barking on social media
- avDaveMail This is ordinary inter-campus mail: Functional, yes, but not all that exciting… Now this is something sent by avDAVE, the legendary media dude at Estrella Mountain Community College: Now that jumps out of your box! Thanks Dave for getting me the audio recordings! Share this barking on social media
- Maricopa ePort 101 (presentation in a wiki in an eport) This afternoon I am doing an hand-on workshop on our Maricopa ePortfolio tool for the participants in our Maricopa Faculty Internship program. We have had some program like this for a few years where a year’s full of experiences, projects, mentoring is supposedly captured in a one page Word document report. I’ve been applying pressure […]
- 2004
- A New Low For Spammers: MLX Package Comment Spams I just got a message from one of our faculty member’s who got a notice that her Maricopa learning eXchange “package” on Creating a Webliography was blessed with a comment from “Casino Gambling” offering tons of wonderful and exotic URLs for various substances and things I had never heard of. So into the database I […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 11 posts previously published on September 22nd
- 2025
- From 1 to 5000 (and beyond) with the DS106 Daily Create Name a web site that you used in 2012 that has not stopped working one day right up to 2025. I’m waiting, I am patient. Hmmmm. Not coming to you? Well take the DS106 Daily Create which published its very first creative challenge, TDC1 on January 8, 2012 and yesterday, September 22, 2025 published TDC5000 […] ➡
- 2022
- Shaping Your WordPress Tech Simply By Changing the Front Door The notion (and act) of shaping your technology1 rather than limiting yourself to what a tool provides still (or always) is resonating with me. I’m thinking about the width of the spectrum from complete control by code to almost no freedom except what a GUI provides, for me WordPress is my go to for many […] ➡
- 2021
- 2019
- Map Making With Leaflet.js As the second part of a series of posts about a leadership model web site created for project managed at JIBC, this one is about some of the early interface explorations I dabbled with. In the first post, I laid ground for the map metaphor for leadership, there would be three “regions” corresponding to the […] ➡
- 2014
- When You think That Tech Is More Awesome Than Possible, yet… Flash! Poof! I thought I just discovered a hidden search gem in my OS X Mavericks system. One of the coolest things in Evernote is uploaded photos with text in the picture, becomes searchable for those words (it does some magic OCR on your images). Now that is magic. This morning I was seeking an […] ➡
- 2012
- Sniffing the Trails of Serendipty (or if you are not linking the web you are just squatting on it) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by mccun934 I’m part of a session at next month’s Open Education Conference on Analyzing and supporting interaction in complex scenarios: the case of DS106 thatb was suggested by Julià Minguillón and also […] ➡
- 2009
- Dead Blog Dog cc licensed flickr photo shared by Carplips I have had a hair tearing hacked WordPress blog experience here over the last 2 days. I don’t know why, but it really knocked my knees out, and I am reeling to figure out why this has gotten to me on an emotional level. That even sounds silly […] ➡
- 2005
- Adios I am going offline for a few days to hibernate and do nothing computer related in Puerto Penasco or how us gringos say it, “Rocky Point”, returning Monday, Sept 26. Adios! Mucho gusto! Share this barking on social media ➡
- avDaveMail This is ordinary inter-campus mail: Functional, yes, but not all that exciting… Now this is something sent by avDAVE, the legendary media dude at Estrella Mountain Community College: Now that jumps out of your box! Thanks Dave for getting me the audio recordings! Share this barking on social media ➡
- Maricopa ePort 101 (presentation in a wiki in an eport) This afternoon I am doing an hand-on workshop on our Maricopa ePortfolio tool for the participants in our Maricopa Faculty Internship program. We have had some program like this for a few years where a year’s full of experiences, projects, mentoring is supposedly captured in a one page Word document report. I’ve been applying pressure […] ➡
- 2004
- A New Low For Spammers: MLX Package Comment Spams I just got a message from one of our faculty member’s who got a notice that her Maricopa learning eXchange “package” on Creating a Webliography was blessed with a comment from “Casino Gambling” offering tons of wonderful and exotic URLs for various substances and things I had never heard of. So into the database I […] ➡
// 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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