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 11 posts previously published on April 29th

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201838 Years Later, The Walrus is Digitized Did Mrs. Tharpe know what she was unleashing when she gave me permission to do a music video for an 11th grade English project? Or even more when she watched me play it back in class, a music video with no sound track. Did she have a clue about the odd song with lyrics we […]
2016YouTube Slaps This Bad Dog a Strike Since there are 500 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, I should not be surprised that it them four years to catch up with my illicit, community guidelines breaking activity: I had a hard time even remembering the video, but it was July 2012, meaning it was something I did while teaching a […]
2014We’re On a Mission of Open This was the academic theme for today’s presentation at OER14 in Newcastle, UK by Rochelle Lockridge, Mariana Funes, and moi, “A DS106 thing happened on the way to the 3M Tech Forum“: DS106 (http://ds106.us/) is a computer science course in Digital Storytelling at the University of Mary Washington (UMW), framed on principles of the web […]
2013Diving into ds106 at Wagner College cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Do you see those faces? That’s what a two hour dive into ds106 can do for you. At least that is what a group of faculty found out Friday at Wagner College a lovely campus on a hill at the tip of Staten Island. […]
201150 Ways: The Movie! The New Wiki! I had fun going overboard on making this promo video for 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story This was created for today’s keynote at the Learning Connections District Champions meeting in Toronto. When Deb invited me to speak she asked me to do a video she could use to summarize the workshop after […] The Movie is Never Quite as Good as the Book cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog While settling in at the conference I was speaking in at York University today, I peeked at this cute book my host Deb Kitchener had at her seat. “It’s a Book” (it might set you back $8 on Amazon) is a cute read, and while […]
2005Quick WP! Wow, another great WordPress characteristic– publishing entries from ecto to WordPress seems almost instantaneous! Previously, clicking “Publish” to MovableType was a minute or more of grinding as MT had to not only put content in the database, but crank through and republish indexes, entry pages, category pages, etc. With WordPress is just goes into the […] A Blog Is a Blog and a Car is a Horseless Carriage Good writing. Personal viewpoints. That’s what its all about. Tom Caotes’ A Horseless Carriage provides a well written, personal perspective on the evolution of weblogs, but he writes not strictly about the history, and more on a broader definition This means that whatever you’re planning to use weblogs for, then you’ll fid them most naturally […]
2004Faculty ePortfolio A faculty member I work with has decided to use our experimental Maricopa ePortfolio to create an online portfolio for his Faculty Evaluation Plan review (acronymically known here as “FEP”)- something never done before in what is a byzantine paper bound process. John Arle teaches online and hybrid biology courses at Phoenix College, and has […]

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

On Michael’s site he might use

There are 11 posts previously published on April 29th

2022WordPress is WordPress (or is it?) (the embed test) WordPress is WordPress, correct? Well… apparently not. This is a WordPress.org self hosted blog, eh? So like the documentation suggests With the WordPress Embed block, you can embed WordPress posts into your posts and pages. https://wordpress.org/support/article/wordpress-embed I ought to be able to embed a post published on my WP.com site? No. WordPress here does not […] &amp#x27A1;
2019Seeking Answers: Can a Narrative Tie a Course Together? This idea has been bouncing in my head for way too long, it’s time to get some help chasing down an answer. And I would be fine if it’s not the one I seek. I have been contacted by a quiet, off the beaten track, but legit organization, –call them the Campbell Consortium– interested in […] &amp#x27A1;
201838 Years Later, The Walrus is Digitized Did Mrs. Tharpe know what she was unleashing when she gave me permission to do a music video for an 11th grade English project? Or even more when she watched me play it back in class, a music video with no sound track. Did she have a clue about the odd song with lyrics we […] &amp#x27A1;
2016YouTube Slaps This Bad Dog a Strike Since there are 500 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, I should not be surprised that it them four years to catch up with my illicit, community guidelines breaking activity: I had a hard time even remembering the video, but it was July 2012, meaning it was something I did while teaching a […] &amp#x27A1;
2014We’re On a Mission of Open This was the academic theme for today’s presentation at OER14 in Newcastle, UK by Rochelle Lockridge, Mariana Funes, and moi, “A DS106 thing happened on the way to the 3M Tech Forum“: DS106 (http://ds106.us/) is a computer science course in Digital Storytelling at the University of Mary Washington (UMW), framed on principles of the web […] &amp#x27A1;
2013Diving into ds106 at Wagner College cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Do you see those faces? That’s what a two hour dive into ds106 can do for you. At least that is what a group of faculty found out Friday at Wagner College a lovely campus on a hill at the tip of Staten Island. […] &amp#x27A1;
201150 Ways: The Movie! The New Wiki! I had fun going overboard on making this promo video for 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story This was created for today’s keynote at the Learning Connections District Champions meeting in Toronto. When Deb invited me to speak she asked me to do a video she could use to summarize the workshop after […] &amp#x27A1; The Movie is Never Quite as Good as the Book cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog While settling in at the conference I was speaking in at York University today, I peeked at this cute book my host Deb Kitchener had at her seat. “It’s a Book” (it might set you back $8 on Amazon) is a cute read, and while […] &amp#x27A1;
2005Quick WP! Wow, another great WordPress characteristic– publishing entries from ecto to WordPress seems almost instantaneous! Previously, clicking “Publish” to MovableType was a minute or more of grinding as MT had to not only put content in the database, but crank through and republish indexes, entry pages, category pages, etc. With WordPress is just goes into the […] &amp#x27A1; A Blog Is a Blog and a Car is a Horseless Carriage Good writing. Personal viewpoints. That’s what its all about. Tom Caotes’ A Horseless Carriage provides a well written, personal perspective on the evolution of weblogs, but he writes not strictly about the history, and more on a broader definition This means that whatever you’re planning to use weblogs for, then you’ll fid them most naturally […] &amp#x27A1;
2004Faculty ePortfolio A faculty member I work with has decided to use our experimental Maricopa ePortfolio to create an online portfolio for his Faculty Evaluation Plan review (acronymically known here as “FEP”)- something never done before in what is a byzantine paper bound process. John Arle teaches online and hybrid biology courses at Phoenix College, and has […] &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.