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 19 posts previously published on February 13th

2022Google Does Some Evil and Franchises Blame to Individual Web Sites Do Google ever really commit to “Do No Evil”? They might not be buddies with Lucifer, but some news about something as banal as fonts is chilling. To me. I await someone with more expertise to shed some light, but this is how I read a recent snipped of chilling tech news. In late January, […]
2019Keep Blog Syndication Simple[r] It should be simple right, if you believe in RSS and that it stands for Really Simple Syndication. Going back to DS106 in 2011 and onward to maybe 12 projects and my own teaching (currently for NetNarr), the blog syndication hub in WordPress has been at the center of a lot of work. I can […] CogDog It 2018 “Company” Report Like last year, the impending FUN of tax season reminds me to start organizing my records (meaning another fake vow to do better record keeping during the year) and to write up some summary for this Company of 1. This year marks 7.5 years since I last drew a regular paycheck. There are times I […] There is Joy in Flicker CC-Attribution Helperville, The Mighty Firefox No Longer Strikes Out With no apologies to Casey… One of my favorite home-spun projects that joys me to see in the world is people using my Flickr CC Attribution Helper, a tool I really built for me to make it easy to quickly form well-constructed and consistent attributions from open licensed flickr images. It’s a simple browser bookmarklet […]
2018Many More Webs Bite The Dust Three years after publishing the first version of Another Web Bites The Dust (35 corpses), it was time to update, and add 24 more dead web sites to the video. This one is made possible by many entities that clearly do not value the web as a piece of culture, like Storify Livefyre Adobe for […]
2016Transforming Photo Attribution from Credit to Stories Yikes, there he goes again blogging about attribution. Yeah. It is a frequent topic here. Sometime a little around a year ago (my searching through my backlog of posts pins it to early December 2014), I started added a photo credit to the bottom of my blog posts. I had noticed that with the featured […] Notes From the Lazy B I JUST FINISHED READING A BOOK? Can I get a badge? As much as I enjoy reading, I am a pathetic xMOOC-like reader- I keep signing up and rarely complete. I have at least 3 books on a table at home with a bookmark in the middle, and on my various apps, at least 5 […] Where a Silly Meme Daily Create Leads I was not going to do today’s DS106 Daily Create task to add a modern context caption to a Frederic Remington painting: I had already done the one that appears there. But I am just sipping coffee, and in much less time than this blog post will take, I made a simple meme image (I […]
2015Screencasts With QuickTime Player, Soundflower, and Ladiocast For the You Show this week I wanted to provide some demos for folks who could not turn up for our Audacity demo sessions (which turned out to be everyone but two people, Gail and Joseph, you guys are the best). I had one I did a few years ago for ds106 where I had […]
2014World Radio Day: ds106 Radio Magic cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine We were excited that SourceFabric asked to stream 2 hours of ds106 radio for their program for World Radio Day. I got a smattering of suggestions interest in the google doc, but a big gold star sticker goes to Dr Jones for sending […] Old Gold Days at Maricopa Jim Groom’s explorations for The Internet Course he is co-teaching with Paul Bond and Paul’s post on Gopher got me sroting the neurons and combing through the archives of my early 1990s days as an Instructional Technologist at the Maricopa Community College. Actually I started as a “Programmer Analyst / Instructional Systems”. I found on […]
2013That Special ds106 Valentine Moment Just put the phone away, will ya? cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This one is for the Valentine’s Day Caption Challenge a rather special one since it was former ds106 student Sara K who sent this out as a challenge last year. It’s only fitting with Valentines Day tomorrow […] Riff-o-GIF-o-Glasses Riffing Todd Conaway’s Riff of David Kernohan’s MOOCs Are People Poster: Sneak preview of tomorrows presentation #designassignment666 #ds106 pic.twitter.com/EYXodAGy — David Kernohan (@dkernohan) February 13, 2013 We riff a riff a gif! Leading the riot bus! Rocking the streets of London mayhem! Why? Because we can. And it’s a ds106 Riff a Gif assignment Share […] Never Going Back to Rosewood cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog A day late for yesterday’s #ds106 Daily Create "Upload a drawing of a place you’ve been, but NEVER want to go back to." tdc.ds106.us/tdc401/ Rosewood State Hospital was the institution my brother David was sent to after I was born (the story on cowbird). The last time […]
2010That Old Expression About Apples and Oranges The subject of the video below grabbed my interest and curiosity from where I saw it first on engadget. But as I watched it, I was mesmerized first by its elegance. Not being a film critic, the simplicity of its form (no music, no spoken words beyond the ambient), the detailed closeups impressed me. But […]
2008A Nice Post Be happy…! posted 18 May ’06, 7.59am MDT PST on flickr …because life is now! Don’t wait for things like this to destroy your happiness. A storytelling moment for the kids at Hummingbird together with kids from our community base, performed by our theatrical director, Valdilene. I would say many of my blog posts are […]
2006ITC Conference Coverage via ePort Blog Here’s an example of something we’d love to see more of via our Maricopa ePortfolio system — a faculty member or any employee using the built in blog tool to provide coverage or notes from a professional conference attended. Phoenix College Biology faculty and Ocotillo Chair John Arle did just that this week as he […] Northern Voiced flickr foto Northern Voicedavailable on my flickr The coveted t-shirt from the Northern Voice 2006 conference. It’s been one day of favorable rest since the close of the Northern Voice 2006 conference here in Vancouver… and I still struggle to capture all thoughts and impressions. The flickr tag stream for northern voice photos was impressive […]
2004Learning Object Reuse Acknowledgment (an idea, an acronym, and not much more) One of the theories (myth?) for learning objects is that their cataloging is there to support re-use. But just making piles of objects in repositories does not intrinsically motivate re-use. About a year ago (BB before blogging, so the first mention was after the fact) I tinkered one afternoon with adding the MovableType Trackback mechanism […]

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

On Michael’s site he might use

There are 19 posts previously published on February 13th

2022Google Does Some Evil and Franchises Blame to Individual Web Sites Do Google ever really commit to “Do No Evil”? They might not be buddies with Lucifer, but some news about something as banal as fonts is chilling. To me. I await someone with more expertise to shed some light, but this is how I read a recent snipped of chilling tech news. In late January, […] &amp#x27A1;
2019Keep Blog Syndication Simple[r] It should be simple right, if you believe in RSS and that it stands for Really Simple Syndication. Going back to DS106 in 2011 and onward to maybe 12 projects and my own teaching (currently for NetNarr), the blog syndication hub in WordPress has been at the center of a lot of work. I can […] &amp#x27A1; CogDog It 2018 “Company” Report Like last year, the impending FUN of tax season reminds me to start organizing my records (meaning another fake vow to do better record keeping during the year) and to write up some summary for this Company of 1. This year marks 7.5 years since I last drew a regular paycheck. There are times I […] &amp#x27A1; There is Joy in Flicker CC-Attribution Helperville, The Mighty Firefox No Longer Strikes Out With no apologies to Casey… One of my favorite home-spun projects that joys me to see in the world is people using my Flickr CC Attribution Helper, a tool I really built for me to make it easy to quickly form well-constructed and consistent attributions from open licensed flickr images. It’s a simple browser bookmarklet […] &amp#x27A1;
2018Many More Webs Bite The Dust Three years after publishing the first version of Another Web Bites The Dust (35 corpses), it was time to update, and add 24 more dead web sites to the video. This one is made possible by many entities that clearly do not value the web as a piece of culture, like Storify Livefyre Adobe for […] &amp#x27A1;
2016Transforming Photo Attribution from Credit to Stories Yikes, there he goes again blogging about attribution. Yeah. It is a frequent topic here. Sometime a little around a year ago (my searching through my backlog of posts pins it to early December 2014), I started added a photo credit to the bottom of my blog posts. I had noticed that with the featured […] &amp#x27A1; Notes From the Lazy B I JUST FINISHED READING A BOOK? Can I get a badge? As much as I enjoy reading, I am a pathetic xMOOC-like reader- I keep signing up and rarely complete. I have at least 3 books on a table at home with a bookmark in the middle, and on my various apps, at least 5 […] &amp#x27A1; Where a Silly Meme Daily Create Leads I was not going to do today’s DS106 Daily Create task to add a modern context caption to a Frederic Remington painting: I had already done the one that appears there. But I am just sipping coffee, and in much less time than this blog post will take, I made a simple meme image (I […] &amp#x27A1;
2015Screencasts With QuickTime Player, Soundflower, and Ladiocast For the You Show this week I wanted to provide some demos for folks who could not turn up for our Audacity demo sessions (which turned out to be everyone but two people, Gail and Joseph, you guys are the best). I had one I did a few years ago for ds106 where I had […] &amp#x27A1;
2014World Radio Day: ds106 Radio Magic cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine We were excited that SourceFabric asked to stream 2 hours of ds106 radio for their program for World Radio Day. I got a smattering of suggestions interest in the google doc, but a big gold star sticker goes to Dr Jones for sending […] &amp#x27A1; Old Gold Days at Maricopa Jim Groom’s explorations for The Internet Course he is co-teaching with Paul Bond and Paul’s post on Gopher got me sroting the neurons and combing through the archives of my early 1990s days as an Instructional Technologist at the Maricopa Community College. Actually I started as a “Programmer Analyst / Instructional Systems”. I found on […] &amp#x27A1;
2013That Special ds106 Valentine Moment Just put the phone away, will ya? cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This one is for the Valentine’s Day Caption Challenge a rather special one since it was former ds106 student Sara K who sent this out as a challenge last year. It’s only fitting with Valentines Day tomorrow […] &amp#x27A1; Riff-o-GIF-o-Glasses Riffing Todd Conaway’s Riff of David Kernohan’s MOOCs Are People Poster: Sneak preview of tomorrows presentation #designassignment666 #ds106 pic.twitter.com/EYXodAGy — David Kernohan (@dkernohan) February 13, 2013 We riff a riff a gif! Leading the riot bus! Rocking the streets of London mayhem! Why? Because we can. And it’s a ds106 Riff a Gif assignment Share […] &amp#x27A1; Never Going Back to Rosewood cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog A day late for yesterday’s #ds106 Daily Create "Upload a drawing of a place you’ve been, but NEVER want to go back to." tdc.ds106.us/tdc401/ Rosewood State Hospital was the institution my brother David was sent to after I was born (the story on cowbird). The last time […] &amp#x27A1;
2010That Old Expression About Apples and Oranges The subject of the video below grabbed my interest and curiosity from where I saw it first on engadget. But as I watched it, I was mesmerized first by its elegance. Not being a film critic, the simplicity of its form (no music, no spoken words beyond the ambient), the detailed closeups impressed me. But […] &amp#x27A1;
2008A Nice Post Be happy…! posted 18 May ’06, 7.59am MDT PST on flickr …because life is now! Don’t wait for things like this to destroy your happiness. A storytelling moment for the kids at Hummingbird together with kids from our community base, performed by our theatrical director, Valdilene. I would say many of my blog posts are […] &amp#x27A1;
2006ITC Conference Coverage via ePort Blog Here’s an example of something we’d love to see more of via our Maricopa ePortfolio system — a faculty member or any employee using the built in blog tool to provide coverage or notes from a professional conference attended. Phoenix College Biology faculty and Ocotillo Chair John Arle did just that this week as he […] &amp#x27A1; Northern Voiced flickr foto Northern Voicedavailable on my flickr The coveted t-shirt from the Northern Voice 2006 conference. It’s been one day of favorable rest since the close of the Northern Voice 2006 conference here in Vancouver… and I still struggle to capture all thoughts and impressions. The flickr tag stream for northern voice photos was impressive […] &amp#x27A1;
2004Learning Object Reuse Acknowledgment (an idea, an acronym, and not much more) One of the theories (myth?) for learning objects is that their cataloging is there to support re-use. But just making piles of objects in repositories does not intrinsically motivate re-use. About a year ago (BB before blogging, so the first mention was after the fact) I tinkered one afternoon with adding the MovableType Trackback mechanism […] &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.