“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 15 posts previously published on April 13th
- 2025
- Creation as Deletion: A Dozen #ErasedAmerica Photos My favorite act of creation after many many globe spins, still remains photography, whether it was on film in the old days to digital cameras to now often the mobile phone camera. I have claimed somewhere? nowhere? That photography, like and yet unlike say Blackout Poetry, is creation by deletion. How? In taking/making a photograph, […]
- 2020
- Under the Hood of WordPlace Over the last 8 months I’ve been tinkering on a WordPress site made for my wife Cori’s high school program. It’s a place for students most at risk of not graduating across three local schools to write, reflect, connect. It’s a web site but there’s much more to it. If you think Central Canada is […]
- 2019
- Best Conference Ever This is just a wee bit of example for a presentation on Not So Stupid WordPress Tricks at April 18, 2019 PressEd Conference, here showing how a post can be used a web direction trick. Share this barking on social media
- 2015
- Open Web Presentation for BC Campus This presentation was almost a month ago, and is pretty much (at least for now) the cap of my TRU Fellowship, but we just got ahold of the video. Brian Lamb and I were invited to do a live streamed […]
- The One, The Only, Rhizome Cowboy Only rhizomes can explain why this idea popped into my head. Maybe it was seeing the #rhizo15 tweets. But there it was, a song going in my head. In the middle of the day I was looking up the tabs. I waited at least until after dinner to write some lyrics. And then practice a […]
- 2012
- On Web Thinking Yesterday’s serene country side drive to Blacksburg was the perfect set up to attend the 7:00 pm talk by Jon Udell — who is here as the first Virginia Tech Distinguished Innovator in Residence. I was invited down by Gardner Campbell, who first connected many of us in education to Jon’s work. As that story […]
- 2011
- Be Part of Crowd Sourced AR Video Making I was here trying my best to stay on target on my list of tasks, when The Twitter® distracted me with A Life Eroding, a cool project from the Tokyo campus of Temple University As described there: This is a video call to participate in the first ever crowdsourced augmented reality music video, produced in […]
- Sterile Professional Videos in the Era of YouTube cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Jim Blob Blann Disclaimer: I have no training in film critique or production, cannot cite obscure Peruvian directors nor dissect plot structures of obscure Norwegian dramas. I just see a wide range of web videos. And I find myself more and more bored watching […]
- Do You Feel Lucky, Wabbit? For my attempt at the ds106 El Mashup assignment, I stuck with a subject used twice so far for other ones- the legendary Dirty Harry. Previously done were Soiled Harry web story page redone from IMDb, and a little audio play with Dirty Daffy. My plan was to mashup up Inspector Callahan with a Warner […]
- 2010
- iRrational iPolarization cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Yeah, I go an iPad with the coolest wallpaper available. Heck, I’ll share it with anyone who wants it. Frankly, I am uttering a collective yawn at the irrational exuberance at one end and the irrational vitriol at the other of the iPad spectrum. It’s just static filled […]
- 2009
- (almost) Effortless Photo Blog Doing the photo a day for the 2009/365 photos group is not all that much an effort; it has become more of a daily habit than regular dental care (don’t tell Dr Fow!). What almost takes more effort is keeping my count organized; I am naming them all this year with a title of 2009/365/x […]
- Five Card Flickr Stories: Code Updates While shaking off the thick layers of coding dust in my Feed2JS efforts, I also took some time to update the code for my Five Card Flickr site- you can play with it now at http://web.nmc.org/5cardstory/. Again, this is a variant of Five Card Nancy, where you are challenged to assemble 5 photos randomly plucked […]
- 2007
- NMC Two Point Oh Hey, I just finished my 2006 summer project! When I joined NMC, I projected having a public version of a new web site ready by September. I lied. Or grossly underestimated. Or lied. But this morning we flipped the switch and lit up the tree. I could blog about all details of this process (and […]
- 2005
- The Dog Ate My Comments Yesterday I was trying to clean out a swath of comment spam on a blog we set up for one of our college’s sites, wiping directly from the database, e.g.: DELETE FROM mt_comments WHERE comment_blog_id=XX AND comment_author like “%poker%” DELETE FROM mt_comments WHERE comment_blog_id=XX AND comment_text like “%cialis%” DELETE FROM mt_comments WHERE comment_blog_id=XX AND comment_email […]
- 2004
On Michael’s site he might use There are 15 posts previously published on April 13th
- 2025
- Creation as Deletion: A Dozen #ErasedAmerica Photos My favorite act of creation after many many globe spins, still remains photography, whether it was on film in the old days to digital cameras to now often the mobile phone camera. I have claimed somewhere? nowhere? That photography, like and yet unlike say Blackout Poetry, is creation by deletion. How? In taking/making a photograph, […] ➡
- 2020
- Under the Hood of WordPlace Over the last 8 months I’ve been tinkering on a WordPress site made for my wife Cori’s high school program. It’s a place for students most at risk of not graduating across three local schools to write, reflect, connect. It’s a web site but there’s much more to it. If you think Central Canada is […] ➡
- 2019
- Best Conference Ever This is just a wee bit of example for a presentation on Not So Stupid WordPress Tricks at April 18, 2019 PressEd Conference, here showing how a post can be used a web direction trick. Share this barking on social media ➡
- 2015
- Open Web Presentation for BC Campus This presentation was almost a month ago, and is pretty much (at least for now) the cap of my TRU Fellowship, but we just got ahold of the video. Brian Lamb and I were invited to do a live streamed […] ➡
- The One, The Only, Rhizome Cowboy Only rhizomes can explain why this idea popped into my head. Maybe it was seeing the #rhizo15 tweets. But there it was, a song going in my head. In the middle of the day I was looking up the tabs. I waited at least until after dinner to write some lyrics. And then practice a […] ➡
- 2012
- On Web Thinking Yesterday’s serene country side drive to Blacksburg was the perfect set up to attend the 7:00 pm talk by Jon Udell — who is here as the first Virginia Tech Distinguished Innovator in Residence. I was invited down by Gardner Campbell, who first connected many of us in education to Jon’s work. As that story […] ➡
- 2011
- Be Part of Crowd Sourced AR Video Making I was here trying my best to stay on target on my list of tasks, when The Twitter® distracted me with A Life Eroding, a cool project from the Tokyo campus of Temple University As described there: This is a video call to participate in the first ever crowdsourced augmented reality music video, produced in […] ➡
- Sterile Professional Videos in the Era of YouTube cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Jim Blob Blann Disclaimer: I have no training in film critique or production, cannot cite obscure Peruvian directors nor dissect plot structures of obscure Norwegian dramas. I just see a wide range of web videos. And I find myself more and more bored watching […] ➡
- Do You Feel Lucky, Wabbit? For my attempt at the ds106 El Mashup assignment, I stuck with a subject used twice so far for other ones- the legendary Dirty Harry. Previously done were Soiled Harry web story page redone from IMDb, and a little audio play with Dirty Daffy. My plan was to mashup up Inspector Callahan with a Warner […] ➡
- 2010
- iRrational iPolarization cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Yeah, I go an iPad with the coolest wallpaper available. Heck, I’ll share it with anyone who wants it. Frankly, I am uttering a collective yawn at the irrational exuberance at one end and the irrational vitriol at the other of the iPad spectrum. It’s just static filled […] ➡
- 2009
- (almost) Effortless Photo Blog Doing the photo a day for the 2009/365 photos group is not all that much an effort; it has become more of a daily habit than regular dental care (don’t tell Dr Fow!). What almost takes more effort is keeping my count organized; I am naming them all this year with a title of 2009/365/x […] ➡
- Five Card Flickr Stories: Code Updates While shaking off the thick layers of coding dust in my Feed2JS efforts, I also took some time to update the code for my Five Card Flickr site- you can play with it now at http://web.nmc.org/5cardstory/. Again, this is a variant of Five Card Nancy, where you are challenged to assemble 5 photos randomly plucked […] ➡
- 2007
- NMC Two Point Oh Hey, I just finished my 2006 summer project! When I joined NMC, I projected having a public version of a new web site ready by September. I lied. Or grossly underestimated. Or lied. But this morning we flipped the switch and lit up the tree. I could blog about all details of this process (and […] ➡
- 2005
- The Dog Ate My Comments Yesterday I was trying to clean out a swath of comment spam on a blog we set up for one of our college’s sites, wiping directly from the database, e.g.: DELETE FROM mt_comments WHERE comment_blog_id=XX AND comment_author like “%poker%” DELETE FROM mt_comments WHERE comment_blog_id=XX AND comment_text like “%cialis%” DELETE FROM mt_comments WHERE comment_blog_id=XX AND comment_email […] ➡
- 2004
// 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.
