“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 10 posts previously published on September 19th
- 2025
- I Blog… …therefore I still Am. Circling back, and forward from, April 19, 2003. That was 8205 days ago, 5809 posts prior to this. All created, managed, and hoisted on my own blog. Featured image: René Descartes image from Lille norske leksikon (Little Norwegian Encyclopedia) listed as public domain, modified by me with screenshot of my first […]
- 2024
- Maximum Tags: Can You Go 75 TPP? Tag, we are it. I love me free form tagging. A bit before there were #hashtags there was the Web2.0 frenzy of folksonomy, and wealth that Wikipedia is, leads me to the birth of a term used quite widely. It rounds counter to the rigidity and forced rules of Official Metadata, in that people, groups, […]
- 2020
- An H5P Branching Scenario That Might Break the Boat Since June I have been pretty deep in H5P support for a BCcampus project (yes. the kitchen). But I had a deep run with H5P on a project earlier in the year, likely pushing the limits of what the Branching Scenario content type can do. I likely will write a lot below about the behind […]
- 2012
- For Professor Bagman A little over a year ago, someone new entered as an open participant in ds106: I’m working this summer as a grant researcher, and part of the project I’m working with has to do with innovations in education. Partway through my project, I stumbled across a blog called The Tech Savvy Educator, and I continued […]
- 2010
- The Greatest iThing Since… Phone Disk One of the largest PITA flavored hurdles of using an iPhone or iPad for more than just lookin’ at stuff is the end arounds one does to move documents on and off the thing. This means either having to sync through iTunes, or more often than not, the 2000s version of sneaker net is emailing […]
- 2007
- Twitter Quote: Email Sig Sighting Even after all these years, and all the spam and phlaff that arrives in my inbox, when i am reading mail form colleagues, I do take note of what is hanging in their sig (signature). In some sense, you might argue it is a very low tech ‘avatar’, it is some array of text we […]
- I Hear Voices The voices are not real but they do have some good ideas posted 11 Mar ’07, 3.10pm MDT PST on flickr Latest sign no the Beaverton-Hillsdale highway. The sign is in Portland, Oregon. (On the Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway, between Portland and Beaverton). I have no affiliation – I just drive or ride the bus past the […]
- Tire Shop Philosophy Horrible Example posted 15 Feb ’05, 8.49am MST PST on flickr "Either be a good example or a horrible warning" Latest sign on the Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway. This is hard to photograph from the bus -it has to stop at a light behind some cars to be in the right place. The sign is in Portland, […]
- 2005
- Taking the Blue Pill Wow, looking back on previous blog posts, I have had a grouchy streaks of barks and growls. Tonight, I am taking the blue pill and maybe readers can look forward for maybe a few weeks of happy posts. I hope it is extra strength! Share this barking on social media
- Permissions Will Get You (Or You Can Do Yourself In) If any readers really think I know what the _____ I am doing with web server technology, please let this morning’s adventure convince you otherwise. By one fell swoop/click, I managed to knock this whole server out of whack. I was trying to do set up a temporary ftp access so a colleague could transmit […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 10 posts previously published on September 19th
- 2025
- I Blog… …therefore I still Am. Circling back, and forward from, April 19, 2003. That was 8205 days ago, 5809 posts prior to this. All created, managed, and hoisted on my own blog. Featured image: René Descartes image from Lille norske leksikon (Little Norwegian Encyclopedia) listed as public domain, modified by me with screenshot of my first […] ➡
- 2024
- Maximum Tags: Can You Go 75 TPP? Tag, we are it. I love me free form tagging. A bit before there were #hashtags there was the Web2.0 frenzy of folksonomy, and wealth that Wikipedia is, leads me to the birth of a term used quite widely. It rounds counter to the rigidity and forced rules of Official Metadata, in that people, groups, […] ➡
- 2020
- An H5P Branching Scenario That Might Break the Boat Since June I have been pretty deep in H5P support for a BCcampus project (yes. the kitchen). But I had a deep run with H5P on a project earlier in the year, likely pushing the limits of what the Branching Scenario content type can do. I likely will write a lot below about the behind […] ➡
- 2012
- For Professor Bagman A little over a year ago, someone new entered as an open participant in ds106: I’m working this summer as a grant researcher, and part of the project I’m working with has to do with innovations in education. Partway through my project, I stumbled across a blog called The Tech Savvy Educator, and I continued […] ➡
- 2010
- The Greatest iThing Since… Phone Disk One of the largest PITA flavored hurdles of using an iPhone or iPad for more than just lookin’ at stuff is the end arounds one does to move documents on and off the thing. This means either having to sync through iTunes, or more often than not, the 2000s version of sneaker net is emailing […] ➡
- 2007
- Twitter Quote: Email Sig Sighting Even after all these years, and all the spam and phlaff that arrives in my inbox, when i am reading mail form colleagues, I do take note of what is hanging in their sig (signature). In some sense, you might argue it is a very low tech ‘avatar’, it is some array of text we […] ➡
- I Hear Voices The voices are not real but they do have some good ideas posted 11 Mar ’07, 3.10pm MDT PST on flickr Latest sign no the Beaverton-Hillsdale highway. The sign is in Portland, Oregon. (On the Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway, between Portland and Beaverton). I have no affiliation – I just drive or ride the bus past the […] ➡
- Tire Shop Philosophy Horrible Example posted 15 Feb ’05, 8.49am MST PST on flickr "Either be a good example or a horrible warning" Latest sign on the Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway. This is hard to photograph from the bus -it has to stop at a light behind some cars to be in the right place. The sign is in Portland, […] ➡
- 2005
- Taking the Blue Pill Wow, looking back on previous blog posts, I have had a grouchy streaks of barks and growls. Tonight, I am taking the blue pill and maybe readers can look forward for maybe a few weeks of happy posts. I hope it is extra strength! Share this barking on social media ➡
- Permissions Will Get You (Or You Can Do Yourself In) If any readers really think I know what the _____ I am doing with web server technology, please let this morning’s adventure convince you otherwise. By one fell swoop/click, I managed to knock this whole server out of whack. I was trying to do set up a temporary ftp access so a colleague could transmit […] ➡
// 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.
Share this barking on social media
