“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 19 posts previously published on October 22nd
- 2025
- Get That Syndication Bus Rolling! Start this thing up! For the Reclaim Open Conference there is a bunch of Conflabulating going on. Someone one had to get the FeedWordPress thing going, might as well leave it tot he dog. It’s been three or four forevers since I messed around with the FeedWordPress plugin but that old C Johnson magic might […]
- 2021
- Researching “Research” on Memes Mmmmm memes. I love that I do not have to explain them. Yet there’s much more to just passing them around or responding to someone’s tweet/email/text message with one you yank off the web. I’ve tried to make the case that there is a use for silly media (and again). We put them to use […]
- 2017
- Is This Old “Tweet & Keynote” Disc Any Good? It’s been while since I did a keynote talk… and even longer since I got my gimmick working to automatically tweet from my Apple Keynote slide deck (first done in 2011). I’d pretty much shied away from slide decks, instead doing more talks lately direct from the web using my own SPLOTpoint or doing things […]
- 2015
- Howdy, Pardner! Round Up For #Western106 This storytelling drive is going to happen. There is a roundup for January 2016, when me and some other riders are gathering to do a new round of The One The Only The Stomp Over MOOCs Open Course in Digital Storytelling, DS106. It’s been riding the open internet plains 5 years now. I’ve signed up […]
- 2014
- A Shiny New Edible Garden Project Site From the Forgotten to Blog Department. And also filed in Last Site That Gets Updated is My Own division. About a year ago, Keira connected me with the folks at the Edible Garden Project (EGP) in Vancouver, who were looking to redo their web site. Check out the site at http://ediblegardenproject.com In calendar time it […]
- Creative Commons Attributor: Now With License Link I was roaming around my dashboard and found a 6 month old post lingering in the draft. I am not even sure why it was left in the draft drawer). Oh well. creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-ND ) flickr photo shared by hawkexpress I do not think I have ever finished a coding project. That […]
- Back to First Internet Friend Visit Last night, in 2014, Tim and I sat in his living room in Eugene reminiscing how we first connected. We both are fuzzy on the timing, but are pretty sure it was 1994. And it was via the internet. No apps. mobile devices, social networks. It was via a listserv. Around this time I was […]
- 2012
- ds106 is a Complex Universe Full of Stars cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe DISCLAIMER: This is mostly a brain dump. Little coherent ideas emerge. Typos will occur. You have been warned. This session I participated in at Open Education 2012 was proposed by Julià Minguillón titled “Analyzing and supporting interaction in complex scenarios: the case of […]
- 2011
- All Your Apps Are Welded Boxes cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by Steve-h I might now go as far to say I “love” my iPhone, but it must be my most regularly used piece of technology. But my first love was, and will be, the web- that bit that works because Sir Tim made it so that […]
- Storyboxing the Friendly Skies cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog My StoryBox had a tougher time getting passed the TSA at the Buffalo airport. They were extremely curious, though I did learn it was a mistake to refer to it as a "PIrate Box" which raised their curiosity to code yellow. Actually it was not a huge […]
- 2010
- More Code Fun: Reading (or ‘to Read’) List While I’m on the code doc kick… this one is not mine, but something I applied on my site. A week or so ago I came across (from RSS feeds? nah, I think it was in twitter? maybe a squirrel stepped o my keyboard?) Steph Gray’s Reading: keeping on top of stuff I save, some […]
- PHP Local Time Code I spent about 15 minutes writing a small PHP function for one of my sites, and then another hour writing it up. What for? Well, let’s back up. If you are running online events where people might come from anywhere, there can always be challenges for getting the right time to people. For our NMC […]
- Hipmunk Makes Flight Planning Hip (and visual) I’m coming off of a fantastic closing session at the NMC Symposium by the Future by Ruben Puentedura on Of Maps, Systems, and Stories: Visualization for Sustainability (we are still processing the recorded audio but there is a gold mine in his slides). Ruben’s examples and ideas on visualization have me inspired to carve up […]
- 2008
- Flickr Video Does Embed (doh like it was there for 2 years, right?) I just noticed on uploading a really short video to flickr that the buttons at the top provides an embed code for copy pasting code to put in your own web site. It’s probablt been there forever, and everyone else on the planet knows it, but it just fell into my radar today. Sometimes, it […]
- Now Available: Source Code for Five Card Flickr I had some code fun in September creating the Five Card Stories site, which provides a simple activity in visual storytelling by making a visitor select from five rounds of randomly chosen images to string together as a story told only in pictures — now the source code is available from Google Code (I would […]
- 2006
- A One Time Political Bark One of the long simmering blog posts not yet written has to do with the settling on of some personal self defined rules of their own blog. If you keep at it long enough, you settle into a self defined rule set, maybe not even knowing it. One of mine is that I do not […]
- 2003
- Our Web Tenth Anniversary (Aluminum Gifts, please) Somewhere in the hustle and bustle of this month I missed a significant milestone. A tenth anniversary worthy of a gift of aluminium (this would be nice but this will do) as tradition goes. It was sometime in October 1993 at our Ocotillo Technology Showcase (“Expose Yourself to Technology”). Demonstrations likely included laser discs, HyperCard, […]
- Just When I thought it was safe to dump IE… Darn! I was that close to being able to complete use Safari for my Mac browsing (love the tabs, the rendering, the bookmark menus on the toolbar..) but alas, another hitch appears. This morning trying to post my latest entry, I kept getting timeout errors on MovableType Rebuild. I tried copying/pasting to a new entry. […]
- League Bloggin’: Learning Objects in the Real World Turns out to be my last session attended at the League for Innovation CIT conference was from the Wisc Online – the Wisconsin Online Resource Center (note: link fails for Safari web browsers despite current flash plug-in). The presentation pretty much as shown is available directory from their site (the “tour” button bottom center) as […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 19 posts previously published on October 22nd
- 2025
- Get That Syndication Bus Rolling! Start this thing up! For the Reclaim Open Conference there is a bunch of Conflabulating going on. Someone one had to get the FeedWordPress thing going, might as well leave it tot he dog. It’s been three or four forevers since I messed around with the FeedWordPress plugin but that old C Johnson magic might […] ➡
- 2021
- Researching “Research” on Memes Mmmmm memes. I love that I do not have to explain them. Yet there’s much more to just passing them around or responding to someone’s tweet/email/text message with one you yank off the web. I’ve tried to make the case that there is a use for silly media (and again). We put them to use […] ➡
- 2017
- Is This Old “Tweet & Keynote” Disc Any Good? It’s been while since I did a keynote talk… and even longer since I got my gimmick working to automatically tweet from my Apple Keynote slide deck (first done in 2011). I’d pretty much shied away from slide decks, instead doing more talks lately direct from the web using my own SPLOTpoint or doing things […] ➡
- 2015
- Howdy, Pardner! Round Up For #Western106 This storytelling drive is going to happen. There is a roundup for January 2016, when me and some other riders are gathering to do a new round of The One The Only The Stomp Over MOOCs Open Course in Digital Storytelling, DS106. It’s been riding the open internet plains 5 years now. I’ve signed up […] ➡
- 2014
- A Shiny New Edible Garden Project Site From the Forgotten to Blog Department. And also filed in Last Site That Gets Updated is My Own division. About a year ago, Keira connected me with the folks at the Edible Garden Project (EGP) in Vancouver, who were looking to redo their web site. Check out the site at http://ediblegardenproject.com In calendar time it […] ➡
- Creative Commons Attributor: Now With License Link I was roaming around my dashboard and found a 6 month old post lingering in the draft. I am not even sure why it was left in the draft drawer). Oh well. creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-ND ) flickr photo shared by hawkexpress I do not think I have ever finished a coding project. That […] ➡
- Back to First Internet Friend Visit Last night, in 2014, Tim and I sat in his living room in Eugene reminiscing how we first connected. We both are fuzzy on the timing, but are pretty sure it was 1994. And it was via the internet. No apps. mobile devices, social networks. It was via a listserv. Around this time I was […] ➡
- 2012
- ds106 is a Complex Universe Full of Stars cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe DISCLAIMER: This is mostly a brain dump. Little coherent ideas emerge. Typos will occur. You have been warned. This session I participated in at Open Education 2012 was proposed by Julià Minguillón titled “Analyzing and supporting interaction in complex scenarios: the case of […] ➡
- 2011
- All Your Apps Are Welded Boxes cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by Steve-h I might now go as far to say I “love” my iPhone, but it must be my most regularly used piece of technology. But my first love was, and will be, the web- that bit that works because Sir Tim made it so that […] ➡
- Storyboxing the Friendly Skies cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog My StoryBox had a tougher time getting passed the TSA at the Buffalo airport. They were extremely curious, though I did learn it was a mistake to refer to it as a "PIrate Box" which raised their curiosity to code yellow. Actually it was not a huge […] ➡
- 2010
- More Code Fun: Reading (or ‘to Read’) List While I’m on the code doc kick… this one is not mine, but something I applied on my site. A week or so ago I came across (from RSS feeds? nah, I think it was in twitter? maybe a squirrel stepped o my keyboard?) Steph Gray’s Reading: keeping on top of stuff I save, some […] ➡
- PHP Local Time Code I spent about 15 minutes writing a small PHP function for one of my sites, and then another hour writing it up. What for? Well, let’s back up. If you are running online events where people might come from anywhere, there can always be challenges for getting the right time to people. For our NMC […] ➡
- Hipmunk Makes Flight Planning Hip (and visual) I’m coming off of a fantastic closing session at the NMC Symposium by the Future by Ruben Puentedura on Of Maps, Systems, and Stories: Visualization for Sustainability (we are still processing the recorded audio but there is a gold mine in his slides). Ruben’s examples and ideas on visualization have me inspired to carve up […] ➡
- 2008
- Flickr Video Does Embed (doh like it was there for 2 years, right?) I just noticed on uploading a really short video to flickr that the buttons at the top provides an embed code for copy pasting code to put in your own web site. It’s probablt been there forever, and everyone else on the planet knows it, but it just fell into my radar today. Sometimes, it […] ➡
- Now Available: Source Code for Five Card Flickr I had some code fun in September creating the Five Card Stories site, which provides a simple activity in visual storytelling by making a visitor select from five rounds of randomly chosen images to string together as a story told only in pictures — now the source code is available from Google Code (I would […] ➡
- 2006
- A One Time Political Bark One of the long simmering blog posts not yet written has to do with the settling on of some personal self defined rules of their own blog. If you keep at it long enough, you settle into a self defined rule set, maybe not even knowing it. One of mine is that I do not […] ➡
- 2003
- Our Web Tenth Anniversary (Aluminum Gifts, please) Somewhere in the hustle and bustle of this month I missed a significant milestone. A tenth anniversary worthy of a gift of aluminium (this would be nice but this will do) as tradition goes. It was sometime in October 1993 at our Ocotillo Technology Showcase (“Expose Yourself to Technology”). Demonstrations likely included laser discs, HyperCard, […] ➡
- Just When I thought it was safe to dump IE… Darn! I was that close to being able to complete use Safari for my Mac browsing (love the tabs, the rendering, the bookmark menus on the toolbar..) but alas, another hitch appears. This morning trying to post my latest entry, I kept getting timeout errors on MovableType Rebuild. I tried copying/pasting to a new entry. […] ➡
- League Bloggin’: Learning Objects in the Real World Turns out to be my last session attended at the League for Innovation CIT conference was from the Wisc Online – the Wisconsin Online Resource Center (note: link fails for Safari web browsers despite current flash plug-in). The presentation pretty much as shown is available directory from their site (the “tour” button bottom center) as […] ➡
// 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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