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 14 posts previously published on July 17th

2017Got a Domain Calling Card? For my newest next (unblogged) project happening all too soon, I am helping an organization in a project where educators most likely new to the concept will be setting up a Domain of Their Own (yes, of course, supported via Reclaim Hosting). And as many know, the result of people’s first peek at cpanel is […]
2014Feed WordPress 101: Feeding The Machine This is part 3 of 5 in a series of posts for Building Connected Courses: Feed WordPress 101 Basic Concepts of Syndication – and what to think about even before you touch that WordPress thing Installing and Setting up Feed WordPress – Minimal settings, and planning the way content is sliced, diced, and recombined »» […]
2013ds106 Daily Create Challenge (17): CogDog’s Exercise Show Rather fitting for the idea of doing a Daily Create bootcamp this month, today’s was a video challenge (which means most people go hide under the bed): Make an Exercise Video for a Common Every Day Activity (e.g washing dishes) The point is to apply the genre of exercise videos, people overly enthusiastic doing something […]
2012MOOC Hysteria They’re coming to get you, educator…. But hey, the zombie MOOCs might just be part of every day future society Sing along with them: Mooc, Mooc, Mooc, Mooc, Mooc, Mooc, Mooc, Mooc, Mooc. There’s nothing you can teach that can’t be scaled. Nothing you can grade that can’t be AI’d. Nothing you can tweet but […] Day 6: Flip the Decibels Your week of Daily Create Challenges is almost over. Are you still in it? Today is another audio one, “Flip the decibels- Make a loud sound soft or a soft sound loud” — and very clever because the creativity is both in the choice and thinking about it, and the execution of it. While 25 […] Day 5: Technology You Cannot Live Without The Daily Create Seven Day Challenge piles up hard this week, with another video one today (I did not even look to see what was lined up when I made the challenge). For today’s we have 18 Challengers still standing, which is respectable. Where’s the others? preparing to have sand kicked into their faces, I […] Neighborhoods Those kind of neighborhoods. The ones that exist in the memory space of black and white TV shows. I can say I know of one of the most unusual neighborhoods in these times of “move in /move out, build a fence around the yard, stay inside and watch TV” – it is a circle of […]
2011Meet Dog Bark Park Dennis Here is another genuine character I met on the road recently. Going past the road to tiny Cottonwood, Idaho, a giant wooden beagle on the left caught my eye; how could I pass up the sign for Dog Bark Park? The big dog is actually a multi-story B&B- yes, you can arrange so spend a […]
2010All Kinds of Bird Crumbs cc licensed flickr photo shared by srqpix After taking my pot shots at twitter for the uselessness of their search (which remains worthless, heck I’d start questioning all kinds of things like trending topic numbers… who can audit that? who cares?) I took a look at few of the other ways to organize your twitter […]
2006I’ll Take the Dry Heat flickr foto 2 p.m. monday commuteavailable on flickr downtown dallas straight ahead, obscured by fog. Ugh. Arrive in Dallas a few hours ago, and its about 106 and 90 percent humidity. I… can….. barely….. breathe….. I…. am….. swimming…. in sweat. And what a nice chatty cab drivery I had. I was almost at the hotel […]
2005Sell Before It Hits 120 flickr foto A Bit More Resolutionavailable on my flickr No Photoshop fudging was done to generate this temperature! This is not that kind of scale… this dial is the temperature in my back yard in Phoenix, and actually the thermometer is shaded by a patio roof (though the cement wall likely bumps it up a […]
2004MLX: Critical Mass or Wide Load? It’s been our belief that it would take time for our Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) to reach that magical tipping point, critical mass- when it contained enough content, resources, objects, ideas that our users could easily find something useful for themselves that they would be self-compelled to add their own stuff. I had MERLOT-ian aspirations. […]
2003Dullest Blog in the World (over-blogging) If ever I think I am blogging too many things, I can use the dullest blog in the world as my reference point. Very tongue-in-cheek (we hope), this blog includes fascinating tidbits such as: Taking a short break July 2I was doing some things. After a while I decided to stop doing them and take […] Google Alert: Another RSS Feeder (and good all around resource) Another gem of a resource that has a hook or two into the RSS game, is the free Google Alert service. Google Alert runs daily Google searches for you and emails you whenever new results appear. Many people use Google Alert to keep track of what the web is saying about them, their interests or […]

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

On Michael’s site he might use

There are 14 posts previously published on July 17th

2017Got a Domain Calling Card? For my newest next (unblogged) project happening all too soon, I am helping an organization in a project where educators most likely new to the concept will be setting up a Domain of Their Own (yes, of course, supported via Reclaim Hosting). And as many know, the result of people’s first peek at cpanel is […] &amp#x27A1;
2014Feed WordPress 101: Feeding The Machine This is part 3 of 5 in a series of posts for Building Connected Courses: Feed WordPress 101 Basic Concepts of Syndication – and what to think about even before you touch that WordPress thing Installing and Setting up Feed WordPress – Minimal settings, and planning the way content is sliced, diced, and recombined »» […] &amp#x27A1;
2013ds106 Daily Create Challenge (17): CogDog’s Exercise Show Rather fitting for the idea of doing a Daily Create bootcamp this month, today’s was a video challenge (which means most people go hide under the bed): Make an Exercise Video for a Common Every Day Activity (e.g washing dishes) The point is to apply the genre of exercise videos, people overly enthusiastic doing something […] &amp#x27A1;
2012MOOC Hysteria They’re coming to get you, educator…. But hey, the zombie MOOCs might just be part of every day future society Sing along with them: Mooc, Mooc, Mooc, Mooc, Mooc, Mooc, Mooc, Mooc, Mooc. There’s nothing you can teach that can’t be scaled. Nothing you can grade that can’t be AI’d. Nothing you can tweet but […] &amp#x27A1; Day 6: Flip the Decibels Your week of Daily Create Challenges is almost over. Are you still in it? Today is another audio one, “Flip the decibels- Make a loud sound soft or a soft sound loud” — and very clever because the creativity is both in the choice and thinking about it, and the execution of it. While 25 […] &amp#x27A1; Day 5: Technology You Cannot Live Without The Daily Create Seven Day Challenge piles up hard this week, with another video one today (I did not even look to see what was lined up when I made the challenge). For today’s we have 18 Challengers still standing, which is respectable. Where’s the others? preparing to have sand kicked into their faces, I […] &amp#x27A1; Neighborhoods Those kind of neighborhoods. The ones that exist in the memory space of black and white TV shows. I can say I know of one of the most unusual neighborhoods in these times of “move in /move out, build a fence around the yard, stay inside and watch TV” – it is a circle of […] &amp#x27A1;
2011Meet Dog Bark Park Dennis Here is another genuine character I met on the road recently. Going past the road to tiny Cottonwood, Idaho, a giant wooden beagle on the left caught my eye; how could I pass up the sign for Dog Bark Park? The big dog is actually a multi-story B&B- yes, you can arrange so spend a […] &amp#x27A1;
2010All Kinds of Bird Crumbs cc licensed flickr photo shared by srqpix After taking my pot shots at twitter for the uselessness of their search (which remains worthless, heck I’d start questioning all kinds of things like trending topic numbers… who can audit that? who cares?) I took a look at few of the other ways to organize your twitter […] &amp#x27A1;
2006I’ll Take the Dry Heat flickr foto 2 p.m. monday commuteavailable on flickr downtown dallas straight ahead, obscured by fog. Ugh. Arrive in Dallas a few hours ago, and its about 106 and 90 percent humidity. I… can….. barely….. breathe….. I…. am….. swimming…. in sweat. And what a nice chatty cab drivery I had. I was almost at the hotel […] &amp#x27A1;
2005Sell Before It Hits 120 flickr foto A Bit More Resolutionavailable on my flickr No Photoshop fudging was done to generate this temperature! This is not that kind of scale… this dial is the temperature in my back yard in Phoenix, and actually the thermometer is shaded by a patio roof (though the cement wall likely bumps it up a […] &amp#x27A1;
2004MLX: Critical Mass or Wide Load? It’s been our belief that it would take time for our Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) to reach that magical tipping point, critical mass- when it contained enough content, resources, objects, ideas that our users could easily find something useful for themselves that they would be self-compelled to add their own stuff. I had MERLOT-ian aspirations. […] &amp#x27A1;
2003Dullest Blog in the World (over-blogging) If ever I think I am blogging too many things, I can use the dullest blog in the world as my reference point. Very tongue-in-cheek (we hope), this blog includes fascinating tidbits such as: Taking a short break July 2I was doing some things. After a while I decided to stop doing them and take […] &amp#x27A1; Google Alert: Another RSS Feeder (and good all around resource) Another gem of a resource that has a hook or two into the RSS game, is the free Google Alert service. Google Alert runs daily Google searches for you and emails you whenever new results appear. Many people use Google Alert to keep track of what the web is saying about them, their interests or […] &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.