“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 20 posts previously published on March 16th
- 2021
- Loom in the SPLOTbox (and extra author sprinkles) Two features entered the SPLOTbox media collector WordPress theme from opposite ends. One is the necessity as invention mother for my own work, and the second being used in a way I never imagined. A Feature for Me For my own work, I am putting SPLOTs to use in my work at the OpenETC. TRU […]
- 2020
- Pechaflickr “Heather Mode” Maybe Daily Challenge While educators assemble resource lists, suggestions, Zoom How To lessons, I’m hoping here to provide some small things one might try to do online besides “moving courses.” This idea came to me last night… and it involves maybe one of the favorite things I have built… pechaflickr. I’ll leave it for you to explore… but […]
- 2016
- Welcome to the Paradox (and Myth) of “Best Tool for X” I gotta say I love getting some good feedback on yesterday’s post about my new gig via comments and tweets. The well wishes were, well, great, but what I really valued immensely were the suggestions people made in my response to me discussion on collaboration systems. Internet, “you complete me” (and “you had me in […]
- First Day on the New Gig It was like a brand new day. Officially, the first day of work on my new project with Creative Commons, which is to help them design a curriculum (of sorts) and a system to provide certifications in the understanding and application of CC. It will be openly licensed (of course), and have an ability to […]
- 2014
- Vectoring The #Thoughtvectors cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Harry Scheihing I have no idea if this image has any meaning here. It’s fun. Or scary. Or just wrong. In which Alan finds that searching flickr for creative commons licensed images tagged “vector: gets alot of people’s efforts at graphic design with Illustrator, […]
- 2011
- GigaPanning My Town I had a lot of fun with the GigaPan back in 2008 when I first was introduced to this device. It is a simple but elegant idea- a robot controller tat holds a camera and makes a series of images in a grid that can be combined in software to form a giant scene. A […]
- My Photo in a Big Book Last week I got an email from someone who works for Millenium House publishers asking for permission to use one of my Gigapan images from Iceland in a new atlas they are doing. The Earth Platinum Atlast is a big ass book – it measures 6 x 4.5 feet: Can you imagine the coffee table […]
- Quick Play with Storify (trying to avoid the “c” word) cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by misterbisson “Curating” web content has been a medium flying buzzword over the last year. I’m not going to wade into the definitions or the tension from the museum quarter. For irony, on searching flickr cc images for “curator”, the image above is of a […]
- 2010
- The Place for Short Comments cc licensed flickr photo shared by JPLatting from the idle wonderings department…and summoning my best Andy Rooney voice Did you ever notice…. how short/brief flickr comments are? “nice photo” “Awesome!” “great shot” — heck you could fit 4 or 5 in a single tweet. Think about it- a good meaty blog post (the kind not […]
- 2009
- CogDogBlog a la iPhone CogDogBlog a la iPhone by cogdogblog posted 16 Mar ’09, 8.54pm MDT PST on flickr Thanks to Andy Rush for pointing out the WPtouch plugin which with a few clicks gave me this cool styled iPhone version of my wordpress blog (also Android phones see it as well, I understand). Oh this is so sweet! […]
- Does My Email Read idiotliveshere@cogdogblog.com? cc licensed flickr photo by deadrobot Good gravy, if you are going to send me spam-mail, at least make it a worthy effort? This one “Your Tax Refund” from supposedly the “Canada Revenue Agency” makes those Kenyan inheritances and dutch lottos seem legit. I really expected more from Canadian Spam, and I am way disappointed […]
- Three Dog Week Three Dog Week by cogdogblog posted 16 Mar ’09, 7.23pm MDT PST on flickr It’s a dog filled house now! I am dog-sitting for friends who went on a road trip. Looking up is Thumper, surrounded by Bobo (left) and Sufi (right) Meet the Crew! First, is noble “Bobo”… Followed by sweet “Sufi” and rounded […]
- sometimes it gets personal… speechless by serhio posted 18 Jun ’08, 9.30am MDT PST on flickr Words are awfully cheap now, they fly around at near light speed (not really, this is metaphor land). They go farther then ever, to unintended places, and thanks to the google-bot, they are out there for a long time. And we don’t see […]
- 2008
- The Minis Speak The comment stream is a raging torrent (121+) to Al Upton’s dire situation of his miniLegend bloggers being squashed by the government– what is telling now are comments from the miniLegends themselves (un-edited): Share this barking on social media
- That Was Bowling That Was Bowling by cogdogblog posted 15 Mar ’08, 1.46pm MDT PST on flickr "That’s a pretty…. wild style of guitar playing, how’d you learn that?" "That was bowling" "Yeah, bowling.. I could tell" I’m digging the British Invasion exhibit at the Museum of Music, Infotainment Island, in Second Life at slurl.com/secondlife/Infotainment%20Island/65/228/43 Join us 9:00 […]
- MiniLegends Squashed: Who Is the Mommy? Sometime last year before my trip to Australia, I discovered the amazing work Al Upton was doing with year 3 students at at Adelaide Australia primary school. The 8 and 9 year old “miniLegends” were blogging, doing creative writing, and getting a fabulous experience in web technology. So it was exciting this year when Al […]
- 2007
- Vito, Send ’em a wiki! Pronto! That was wild. After composing the last post on wiki stuff, I decided to try ou Send2Wiki, where I managed to post my blog entry in Italian!. Amazing! But ick, a flickr page… does not send very well. Share this barking on social media
- It’s a Blog.. A Wiki… and a Floor Wax Leigh Blackall has some great rumblings on his Vision for Wikieducator, starting with the rant: The problem with wikis is that they require people to remember to contribute, stop what they’re doing, go to the wiki, click edit and retype what they wrote somewhere else already, such as in a blog, email, or other media […]
- 2004
- More on Maricopa Bloggers This slipped off my “to-do” list, and fell into the crevice behind my desk 😉 Back in February, I mentioned our Online Learning Group meeting where we had some local demos of how some of our faculty are starting to use weblogs. Well, I forgot to come back and post the notes from that meeting, […]
- How News Travels on the Net (Like Driving Directions from Some Yahoo?) Found at and hereby atriibuted to elearnspace comes this beautful grpahics and post from Stephen VanDyke on How News Travels on the Internet: I read the Wired article Warning: Blogs Can Be Infectious, and thought it was informative. But it seemed to be lacking the big picture view of how the news travels. The Blog […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 20 posts previously published on March 16th
- 2021
- Loom in the SPLOTbox (and extra author sprinkles) Two features entered the SPLOTbox media collector WordPress theme from opposite ends. One is the necessity as invention mother for my own work, and the second being used in a way I never imagined. A Feature for Me For my own work, I am putting SPLOTs to use in my work at the OpenETC. TRU […] ➡
- 2020
- Pechaflickr “Heather Mode” Maybe Daily Challenge While educators assemble resource lists, suggestions, Zoom How To lessons, I’m hoping here to provide some small things one might try to do online besides “moving courses.” This idea came to me last night… and it involves maybe one of the favorite things I have built… pechaflickr. I’ll leave it for you to explore… but […] ➡
- 2016
- Welcome to the Paradox (and Myth) of “Best Tool for X” I gotta say I love getting some good feedback on yesterday’s post about my new gig via comments and tweets. The well wishes were, well, great, but what I really valued immensely were the suggestions people made in my response to me discussion on collaboration systems. Internet, “you complete me” (and “you had me in […] ➡
- First Day on the New Gig It was like a brand new day. Officially, the first day of work on my new project with Creative Commons, which is to help them design a curriculum (of sorts) and a system to provide certifications in the understanding and application of CC. It will be openly licensed (of course), and have an ability to […] ➡
- 2014
- Vectoring The #Thoughtvectors cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Harry Scheihing I have no idea if this image has any meaning here. It’s fun. Or scary. Or just wrong. In which Alan finds that searching flickr for creative commons licensed images tagged “vector: gets alot of people’s efforts at graphic design with Illustrator, […] ➡
- 2011
- GigaPanning My Town I had a lot of fun with the GigaPan back in 2008 when I first was introduced to this device. It is a simple but elegant idea- a robot controller tat holds a camera and makes a series of images in a grid that can be combined in software to form a giant scene. A […] ➡
- My Photo in a Big Book Last week I got an email from someone who works for Millenium House publishers asking for permission to use one of my Gigapan images from Iceland in a new atlas they are doing. The Earth Platinum Atlast is a big ass book – it measures 6 x 4.5 feet: Can you imagine the coffee table […] ➡
- Quick Play with Storify (trying to avoid the “c” word) cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by misterbisson “Curating” web content has been a medium flying buzzword over the last year. I’m not going to wade into the definitions or the tension from the museum quarter. For irony, on searching flickr cc images for “curator”, the image above is of a […] ➡
- 2010
- The Place for Short Comments cc licensed flickr photo shared by JPLatting from the idle wonderings department…and summoning my best Andy Rooney voice Did you ever notice…. how short/brief flickr comments are? “nice photo” “Awesome!” “great shot” — heck you could fit 4 or 5 in a single tweet. Think about it- a good meaty blog post (the kind not […] ➡
- 2009
- CogDogBlog a la iPhone CogDogBlog a la iPhone by cogdogblog posted 16 Mar ’09, 8.54pm MDT PST on flickr Thanks to Andy Rush for pointing out the WPtouch plugin which with a few clicks gave me this cool styled iPhone version of my wordpress blog (also Android phones see it as well, I understand). Oh this is so sweet! […] ➡
- Does My Email Read idiotliveshere@cogdogblog.com? cc licensed flickr photo by deadrobot Good gravy, if you are going to send me spam-mail, at least make it a worthy effort? This one “Your Tax Refund” from supposedly the “Canada Revenue Agency” makes those Kenyan inheritances and dutch lottos seem legit. I really expected more from Canadian Spam, and I am way disappointed […] ➡
- Three Dog Week Three Dog Week by cogdogblog posted 16 Mar ’09, 7.23pm MDT PST on flickr It’s a dog filled house now! I am dog-sitting for friends who went on a road trip. Looking up is Thumper, surrounded by Bobo (left) and Sufi (right) Meet the Crew! First, is noble “Bobo”… Followed by sweet “Sufi” and rounded […] ➡
- sometimes it gets personal… speechless by serhio posted 18 Jun ’08, 9.30am MDT PST on flickr Words are awfully cheap now, they fly around at near light speed (not really, this is metaphor land). They go farther then ever, to unintended places, and thanks to the google-bot, they are out there for a long time. And we don’t see […] ➡
- 2008
- The Minis Speak The comment stream is a raging torrent (121+) to Al Upton’s dire situation of his miniLegend bloggers being squashed by the government– what is telling now are comments from the miniLegends themselves (un-edited): Share this barking on social media ➡
- That Was Bowling That Was Bowling by cogdogblog posted 15 Mar ’08, 1.46pm MDT PST on flickr "That’s a pretty…. wild style of guitar playing, how’d you learn that?" "That was bowling" "Yeah, bowling.. I could tell" I’m digging the British Invasion exhibit at the Museum of Music, Infotainment Island, in Second Life at slurl.com/secondlife/Infotainment%20Island/65/228/43 Join us 9:00 […] ➡
- MiniLegends Squashed: Who Is the Mommy? Sometime last year before my trip to Australia, I discovered the amazing work Al Upton was doing with year 3 students at at Adelaide Australia primary school. The 8 and 9 year old “miniLegends” were blogging, doing creative writing, and getting a fabulous experience in web technology. So it was exciting this year when Al […] ➡
- 2007
- Vito, Send ’em a wiki! Pronto! That was wild. After composing the last post on wiki stuff, I decided to try ou Send2Wiki, where I managed to post my blog entry in Italian!. Amazing! But ick, a flickr page… does not send very well. Share this barking on social media ➡
- It’s a Blog.. A Wiki… and a Floor Wax Leigh Blackall has some great rumblings on his Vision for Wikieducator, starting with the rant: The problem with wikis is that they require people to remember to contribute, stop what they’re doing, go to the wiki, click edit and retype what they wrote somewhere else already, such as in a blog, email, or other media […] ➡
- 2004
- More on Maricopa Bloggers This slipped off my “to-do” list, and fell into the crevice behind my desk 😉 Back in February, I mentioned our Online Learning Group meeting where we had some local demos of how some of our faculty are starting to use weblogs. Well, I forgot to come back and post the notes from that meeting, […] ➡
- How News Travels on the Net (Like Driving Directions from Some Yahoo?) Found at and hereby atriibuted to elearnspace comes this beautful grpahics and post from Stephen VanDyke on How News Travels on the Internet: I read the Wired article Warning: Blogs Can Be Infectious, and thought it was informative. But it seemed to be lacking the big picture view of how the news travels. The Blog […] ➡
// 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.
