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 March 11th

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2015SPLOT By The Numbers Five. That’s it. Five SPLOTs (Smalles? Possible? Learning? Open? Tools?) created during my TRU Fellowship. But hear me out- it’s not about the tools. Repeat again… “It’s not about the tools” On the heels of the fellowship Brian Lamb and […] The You Show by the Insignificant Numbers The working title for this post has been “What Might Be Working when It Looks Like Nothing is Working.” I plan to throw out some numbers that are insignificant not by their values, but because they really do not tell […] TRU Writer as Platform for Web Journals The SPLOT Tool I am most proud of is the TRU Writer- there is more to write later about how it represents the SPLOT idea. We made it first as an experiment in creating a rich publishing platform that people […] Do Not Be Limited by Reverse Chronological Order Something like 98.5% (a totally made up number) of WordPress sites are bloggy- a front page of posts arranged in reverse chronological order, be just a vertical stack or little square icons. Hence when I say “WordPress” most people see […]
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2004Turn Your Attention A Second… Roaches Keep Coming It’s been a while since I posted about those smelly blog spam cock roaches… mainly because the MTBlacklist Plugin has been quietly running in the background. However, in the last two days the number and frequency of blogspam has picked up. You can identify them quite easily when the comments are emailed to you– especially […]

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 March 11th

20226x6x1 Two Things To Stand On Earlier in the week I thought I might have 6 for this post as part of the Write 6×6 thing I signed up for. I was thinking of experiences I had this week that affirm or support what (I think) I know. These were triggered by interactions this week as the organization I work for, […] &amp#x27A1;
2020The Greatest and Most Flawed Experiment Ever in Online Learning I can’t say I’ve ever aimed to “put courses online.” The focus of my un-illustrious edtech career has been helping people find creative ways to leverage technology, media, practices, especially on the internet, into their endeavors, especially teaching. Since the early 1990s, most of the uptake has been by theft left side of “the chasm”. […] &amp#x27A1;
2016Open is The Porch Light Being On (and more) When I hear folks in my stream sharing stuff for Open Education Week, my inner cynic wonders what they do the rest of the year. Or speculate a world where we do not have to draw attention in this way to Openness. I get it. The whole idea is to raise awareness, and most of […] &amp#x27A1; The Good, The Bad, and The Puppy (and some pondering on Making / Making of) I think it was Mariana Funes that share what I think is one of the best GIF’s I’ve seen pic.twitter.com/S9wtnaYs8M — Amy Hoy (@amyhoy) March 10, 2016 There is so much to like about this play on the final shoot out scene from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly– the unexpected insert of the […] &amp#x27A1;
2015SPLOT By The Numbers Five. That’s it. Five SPLOTs (Smalles? Possible? Learning? Open? Tools?) created during my TRU Fellowship. But hear me out- it’s not about the tools. Repeat again… “It’s not about the tools” On the heels of the fellowship Brian Lamb and […] &amp#x27A1; The You Show by the Insignificant Numbers The working title for this post has been “What Might Be Working when It Looks Like Nothing is Working.” I plan to throw out some numbers that are insignificant not by their values, but because they really do not tell […] &amp#x27A1; TRU Writer as Platform for Web Journals The SPLOT Tool I am most proud of is the TRU Writer- there is more to write later about how it represents the SPLOT idea. We made it first as an experiment in creating a rich publishing platform that people […] &amp#x27A1; Do Not Be Limited by Reverse Chronological Order Something like 98.5% (a totally made up number) of WordPress sites are bloggy- a front page of posts arranged in reverse chronological order, be just a vertical stack or little square icons. Hence when I say “WordPress” most people see […] &amp#x27A1;
2011ds106 Radio Brings You Scott Lo’s Live Reports from Tokyo cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Zellaby Radio is old and new again with free form ds106 radio, but today, today, today, took it to a whole new level. One of the best parts of this experience has been making new connections, and one I have really dug has been […] &amp#x27A1;
2005Just a Wiki? Not! Check Out Jotspot Interested in wikis, but turned off by the geeky interface, the technical set up hurdle, or the fear of spam? You’ve got company. But I just quickly scanned Jotspot, billed as “the application wiki”. From what I can scan, it is a second generation wiki offering a WYSIWIG editing interface (“Nothing new to learn. If […] &amp#x27A1;
2004Turn Your Attention A Second… Roaches Keep Coming It’s been a while since I posted about those smelly blog spam cock roaches… mainly because the MTBlacklist Plugin has been quietly running in the background. However, in the last two days the number and frequency of blogspam has picked up. You can identify them quite easily when the comments are emailed to you– especially […] &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.