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 May 22nd

2025My Own Personal Theory for The Death of the Web citing Python, M (1975) You can’t click without hitting the proclamations of the web being dead/useless/broken/unusable. Why the web is bad? What happened to the web? And no shortage of Dead Internet Theories. Definitely the most palpable one to me is well enshrined as a word of the year, with Enshittification is so well explained by Cory Doctorow (I […]
2023The Joy of Web Improbability: The Buggles on/in front of #DS106 TV Keep the internet weird and un-expected, not managed by machine languages and corporatized algorithms, but by the small human acts of sharing. Ok? This has happened to me countless times yet never gets old. So via Mastodon, all the way from New Zealand, my colleague Stephen Harlow thinks to share this: Indeed, in a YouTube […]
2020#NetNarr Season 4: Net Mirror Post Script Oops. Speaking of slacking on the blogging, the last post here on this year’s Networked Narratives class was the first one about this year’s class. This fourth iteration of this change it up every year course co-taught with Mia Zamora at Kean University mixed things up from previous years. More on that soon. From the […]
2018Print Yer SPLOTpoints I admit I hardly think of printing web pages. But it’s easy to get limited by your own scope of stuff you do.. One of our most active and prolific Ontario Extend Participants, @NurseKillam aka Laura Killam, has been an eager SPLOT poster child, and her questions last year led me to add a number […]
2017The Digital Revolution Will Not Be Powerpointed (nor MOOCed) I’m not a MOOC completer. I am zero for life. My longest duration has been maybe 2 weeks, and more typically, much less. I am not denying that others get value of them and develop rich connective experiences. But I find the recipe structure and the activity behind a login as lifeless as the job […]
2013Immigration Deform TED Talk Probably the most well received talk at TED Tea Party City was Alien Woman, who shared her personal and moving story of thwarting the alien invasion. This Fantasy TED Talk assignment is brought to you by the ds10zone: Create a scene from a TED Talk being given by a fictional character. Obscure or well known, […] Web Storytelling Wooster Style cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I’ve lost track of the count, but for 3 or 4 years, Jon Breitenbucher has invited me to remotely present 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story for faculty participating at the College of Wooster’s annuam Faculty Fellowship institute. When he approached me […]
2012This Little Hobo cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Duncan Brown (Cradlehall) It’s not quite the odyssey of last year but I am starting tomorrow on a string of summer travel- my gracious thanks to Jim Groom and the DTLT crew at UMW for their flexibility in letting me roam and work at the […] 50 Ways to Wooster cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by bernat… Today was the third time I was invited to do a remote presentation of 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story for the Wooster College Faculty Fellows Program. Since Jon and Matt visited UMW a few weeks back, we had a good […] Sometimes You Just Have to GIF Yourself Out of a Jam I’m thinking of Jerry’s note this morning (happy to see him signed up for Camp Magic Macguffin) “@lukew: “an artist understands that self-renewal is the only way to avoid burning out.””looking at #ds106 as a self-renewal project. — Jerry Slezak (@jslezak) May 22, 2012 With the startup of our online class, I worry about letting […]
2011Flickr Photo, A Log from Arizona, and a Pen Since I have asked others to share an Amazing Story of Openness, it is only fitting that I do one myself. This is a new one that happened this year: The story really played out on flickr, where I have crossed comments many times with Di (or "windsordi"), here she comments on my pile of […] When WordPress Has Memory Woes cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by .m for matthijs I’m hoping to carve out some time soon to get back to the garage and return to tinkering with WordPress. To that end, I spent some time categorizing new and old posts, so I have a collection now of things blogged […] May Story a Day #22: Grandest Blog It was a windy day at the Grand Canyon, but it’s clear the vistas and grandeur brought some clarity to Jim Groom’s perspectives on who has the greatest blog. Yeah, 4Life! Share this barking on social media
2010The Reward After a two hour into the wind and dodge the speedboats kayak excursion on Apache Lake… this is good. Damn good. The desert heat here is just starting to slowly simmer, just a tease of the oven baked temps you will see here in a few weeks. But it’s a somewhat cool breeze blowing at […]
2009WordPress Shazam! Your Category is Now a Page cc licensed flickr photo shared by ElDave The main navigation of most WordPress sites is driven by cycling through all of the content that are WordPress pages– which is nice, but sometimes you have content that you don;t want cluttering the navbar. Or maybe you want to insert something that is not a Page into […] Connecting Calendars in the Cloud cc licensed flickr photo shared by ejhogbin Calendar data has always stumped me- on one hand it seems rather structured — something (data) happens on a date (data) maybe at a place (data) but it is something people much more savvy than I struggle with as it gets more complex… but I am not writing […]
2007Me TV Uh-oh, my 15 minutes of fame on TV is out and might be up. As previously noted, a few weeks back, I flew in and out of San Jose to be a panelist on the Ready2Net panel on “Web 2.0 Comes to Campus” (Drat you Bryan Alexander, likely too busy yourself, you should have been […]
2006Drupal-ing I am about shoulder deep in trying to learn Drupal as intended for a new platform to implement for the NMC web site– obviously since it can do so much, it lends itself for creating a multi-faceted site with customizable themes, separate domains for different projects, and all the 2.0-ish tools you’d hope are in […]
2003Blogs, RSS, Wikis (“Oh My”) Librarian David Mattison compiled this comprehensive , yet concise (is that possible) collection of resources for Blogs, RSS, and Wikis (gleaned from OLDaily). Share this barking on social media

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 May 22nd

2025My Own Personal Theory for The Death of the Web citing Python, M (1975) You can’t click without hitting the proclamations of the web being dead/useless/broken/unusable. Why the web is bad? What happened to the web? And no shortage of Dead Internet Theories. Definitely the most palpable one to me is well enshrined as a word of the year, with Enshittification is so well explained by Cory Doctorow (I […] &amp#x27A1;
2023The Joy of Web Improbability: The Buggles on/in front of #DS106 TV Keep the internet weird and un-expected, not managed by machine languages and corporatized algorithms, but by the small human acts of sharing. Ok? This has happened to me countless times yet never gets old. So via Mastodon, all the way from New Zealand, my colleague Stephen Harlow thinks to share this: Indeed, in a YouTube […] &amp#x27A1;
2020#NetNarr Season 4: Net Mirror Post Script Oops. Speaking of slacking on the blogging, the last post here on this year’s Networked Narratives class was the first one about this year’s class. This fourth iteration of this change it up every year course co-taught with Mia Zamora at Kean University mixed things up from previous years. More on that soon. From the […] &amp#x27A1;
2018Print Yer SPLOTpoints I admit I hardly think of printing web pages. But it’s easy to get limited by your own scope of stuff you do.. One of our most active and prolific Ontario Extend Participants, @NurseKillam aka Laura Killam, has been an eager SPLOT poster child, and her questions last year led me to add a number […] &amp#x27A1;
2017The Digital Revolution Will Not Be Powerpointed (nor MOOCed) I’m not a MOOC completer. I am zero for life. My longest duration has been maybe 2 weeks, and more typically, much less. I am not denying that others get value of them and develop rich connective experiences. But I find the recipe structure and the activity behind a login as lifeless as the job […] &amp#x27A1;
2013Immigration Deform TED Talk Probably the most well received talk at TED Tea Party City was Alien Woman, who shared her personal and moving story of thwarting the alien invasion. This Fantasy TED Talk assignment is brought to you by the ds10zone: Create a scene from a TED Talk being given by a fictional character. Obscure or well known, […] &amp#x27A1; Web Storytelling Wooster Style cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I’ve lost track of the count, but for 3 or 4 years, Jon Breitenbucher has invited me to remotely present 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story for faculty participating at the College of Wooster’s annuam Faculty Fellowship institute. When he approached me […] &amp#x27A1;
2012This Little Hobo cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Duncan Brown (Cradlehall) It’s not quite the odyssey of last year but I am starting tomorrow on a string of summer travel- my gracious thanks to Jim Groom and the DTLT crew at UMW for their flexibility in letting me roam and work at the […] &amp#x27A1; 50 Ways to Wooster cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by bernat… Today was the third time I was invited to do a remote presentation of 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story for the Wooster College Faculty Fellows Program. Since Jon and Matt visited UMW a few weeks back, we had a good […] &amp#x27A1; Sometimes You Just Have to GIF Yourself Out of a Jam I’m thinking of Jerry’s note this morning (happy to see him signed up for Camp Magic Macguffin) “@lukew: “an artist understands that self-renewal is the only way to avoid burning out.””looking at #ds106 as a self-renewal project. — Jerry Slezak (@jslezak) May 22, 2012 With the startup of our online class, I worry about letting […] &amp#x27A1;
2011Flickr Photo, A Log from Arizona, and a Pen Since I have asked others to share an Amazing Story of Openness, it is only fitting that I do one myself. This is a new one that happened this year: The story really played out on flickr, where I have crossed comments many times with Di (or "windsordi"), here she comments on my pile of […] &amp#x27A1; When WordPress Has Memory Woes cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by .m for matthijs I’m hoping to carve out some time soon to get back to the garage and return to tinkering with WordPress. To that end, I spent some time categorizing new and old posts, so I have a collection now of things blogged […] &amp#x27A1; May Story a Day #22: Grandest Blog It was a windy day at the Grand Canyon, but it’s clear the vistas and grandeur brought some clarity to Jim Groom’s perspectives on who has the greatest blog. Yeah, 4Life! Share this barking on social media &amp#x27A1;
2010The Reward After a two hour into the wind and dodge the speedboats kayak excursion on Apache Lake… this is good. Damn good. The desert heat here is just starting to slowly simmer, just a tease of the oven baked temps you will see here in a few weeks. But it’s a somewhat cool breeze blowing at […] &amp#x27A1;
2009WordPress Shazam! Your Category is Now a Page cc licensed flickr photo shared by ElDave The main navigation of most WordPress sites is driven by cycling through all of the content that are WordPress pages– which is nice, but sometimes you have content that you don;t want cluttering the navbar. Or maybe you want to insert something that is not a Page into […] &amp#x27A1; Connecting Calendars in the Cloud cc licensed flickr photo shared by ejhogbin Calendar data has always stumped me- on one hand it seems rather structured — something (data) happens on a date (data) maybe at a place (data) but it is something people much more savvy than I struggle with as it gets more complex… but I am not writing […] &amp#x27A1;
2007Me TV Uh-oh, my 15 minutes of fame on TV is out and might be up. As previously noted, a few weeks back, I flew in and out of San Jose to be a panelist on the Ready2Net panel on “Web 2.0 Comes to Campus” (Drat you Bryan Alexander, likely too busy yourself, you should have been […] &amp#x27A1;
2006Drupal-ing I am about shoulder deep in trying to learn Drupal as intended for a new platform to implement for the NMC web site– obviously since it can do so much, it lends itself for creating a multi-faceted site with customizable themes, separate domains for different projects, and all the 2.0-ish tools you’d hope are in […] &amp#x27A1;
2003Blogs, RSS, Wikis (“Oh My”) Librarian David Mattison compiled this comprehensive , yet concise (is that possible) collection of resources for Blogs, RSS, and Wikis (gleaned from OLDaily). Share this barking on social media &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.