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 23 posts previously published on May 10th

2023Lying, Hallucinating? I, MuddGPT Sigh, one cannot avoid The Topic, the Only Thing as it has been grailed. At least it provides fodder for some mocking. It’s so easy even with the merest of ChatGPT et al interaction to respond under the influence of the Weizenbaum effect made visible in the verbs we choose. And like Laura Czerniewicz wrote […]
2020Never Motherless Mothers’ Day when your mother has passed on… there are no flowers to send, no cards to mail, no phone calls. But that does not mean nothing to do (not like not writing too many double negatives!). The first Mothers Day after mom passed on, in my post I lifted the lyrics from the song […]
2017Exploring a Markdown Converter Warning: possible technical jargon will follow, all efforts are being made to keep it to a minimum. In our recent presentation at the 2017 Creative Commons Summit I attempted to explain how the content source for the Certificates lives as Markdown format in GitHub (that’s minus two jargon points). Since we have a group of […]
2016Vestiges and Prospects One day I wake up with a thought. Actually, it does not pop in just like that. I am not a cartoon character with a light bulb over my head. The thought starts as a background hum, a slow buzzing sound that might be calling your name, or maybe it just is noise. Something outside. […] Certifications Remixed: Notes for DC Meeting This is a summary of my notes made in preparation for the May 2016 project meeting. Part of our pre-work for the first project meeting (held May 11-13, 2016 in Washington DC) we were asked to review a number of existing certification programs to find elements we would want to “remix” into the Creative Commons […]
2015Cookies and Metal Airline Knives It’s taken me 51 years to get around to baking cookies. Honoring Mother’s Day and my mom’s own tradition it seemed time to try. As a diabetic, chocolate chip cookies don’t work too well (yeah I know there is imitation chocolate), but recently I noticed in the inside of the Quaker Oats bin was a […] This One Time in #DS106 Camp We Went So Rhizomatically Headless Whilst passing through various discussions, tweet streams, blog posts about education, I end up feeling like Michelle Flaherty because I am always reaching for my experience and examples from ds106 (I won’t embed the video 😉 While not much actively involved lately, since 2011, I have been an open participant, a face to face course […]
2013A Year of Breadlike Syllabus Making for ds106 cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Little Wide World During a presentation last month for the TCC World Online Conference a participant noted in the chat with some irony, that despite the unconventional form and function of ds106 I pointed them to a traditional (long) syllabus for my 2013 class. […] Famous MOOCsters of EDULANDIA Because Audrey asked… https://twitter.com/audreywatters/status/332892228722765824 Perhaps monstering soon at http://moocthulhu.com/ Look closely into the eye of Cthulhu to see its true intent. Share this barking on social media
2011Who’s the Baboon? I picked up Sands of Kalahari at a thrift store, with a set of other books chosen merely because they looked “old” and I wanted a classic looking row on my shelf. For some reason I started thumbing through it, and fell right into an engrossing story. At a surface level, it looks like most […] May Story a Day #10: I’m As Bored As Hell… 10 days in to one digital story per day in May, 10 stories done. Still going strong. Today was a play with something I wanted to try for a while, an overdub of my own audio over a classic scene, where I change the script to say what I want it to say. My timing […] Dogfographic I get a steady stream of those mass-emailed requests to write blog post for products or do link sharing, and 99.9% of them go in the poop bag. Sometimes one comes along that gets past the guard dog, and the message from Matt was obviously written by someone who has read my stuff. His site […]
2010The Thing Formerly Known As Blogging About Northern Voice 2010 cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Vancouver is indeed a special place for me. I’ll take any bait to attend a conference there, though no incentive is needed for Northern Voice. It always has been, and even with its growth this year to over 500 attendees, more than your garden variety slap a name […] Bring Out Your Blogs mashup of flickr cc licensed photos by digital_trash and by h.koppdelaney I had a blast with this session from Northern Voice that I arm twisted Brian Lamb and Chris Lott to be part of, which I had pitched originally as Every few months some pundit posts something online stating that blogging is dead (invariably posted […]
2009Mind Numbing Stupidity of Blocking (“that’s entertainment”) I’ve never suffered the degradation of working in an organization that acted as my Net Mommy– one that told me I was not old enough or mature enough to monitor my own internet activity. I pity my colleagues in Australia where, as one emailed me tonight, some arbitrary machine of divine intelligence has decided that […] Only Solar Action is Virtual GE SmartGrid Virtual Solar Energy by cogdogblog posted 10 May ’09, 8.54pm MDT PST on flickr I’d seen this pass by the stream of cool technologies, but while visiting Bryan Alexander, he printed out the correct picture to generate this fun bit of video projection from the GE Smart Grid site ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid When you hold […] If YouTube is not weird enough, yooouuutuuube it Watch any YouTube video in a flowing stream of frame shots? Try Yooouuutuuube. It’s better seen than described- the spaced out version of Dominoe: linktribution to Mashable who thankfully do not obfuscate their post URLs with google feedproxy gunk in their RSS feeds Share this barking on social media
2008Take Control of Your Twitter! You’re hooked on twitter. At first you thought it was the dumbest thing anyone can do, but next thing you know, you have 8000 updates. You have signed the Twitter Life Cycle summit log. And them, out of the blue something goes “technically wrong”. Or as more often happens, you are paging through your tweets […]
2005Staying In the Clips flickr foto Road 1 Skin 0available on my flickr This is trivial as far as road rash– just my mental record of what it means when you are learning to bicycle with cleated shoes…. I keep meaning to write some relative posts about my recent work, but keep getting distracted by every day antics. And […] Jeffrey Stone, Do You Think I am A Professional Moron? I’m a fan of Wired, sifting through the slick ads for the sometimes good writing… and I lifted the Wired. Tired. Expired. theme for a recent presentation. But however “cool” a magazine may pass itself off for, underneath it is a business and there are bean counters and bottom liners working to milk my money. […] While I Was Sleeping (I Was Not Charging Your iPod) I was happily iPodding my bicycle route home when my Shuffle went south, blinking amber lights. The battery drained, cutting the Clash off in mid song. Wow, after getting used to the audio track while biking, the lack of it was, well deafening. It turns out when I plugged it into my iBook at night, […]
2004Spammers 12 / Me Zero It was all for nought. My research, attempts to tidy up the movabletype holes, changing names of comment scripts, did squat. I just combed through and deleted 12 blog comment spams, generously sent in a swift spurt, all related somehow to animals, by guess. I am ready to raise the white flag and kill the […] mcli Forum Spring 2004 Just posted the web version of our once per semester publication, the mcli Forum which our office has been publishing in print and paper since 1993 (before 2000 it was the Labyrinth-Forum). We have a mixture of faculty, guest, and our own staff authored articles that highlight teaching, learning, assessment, and technology efforts at Maricopa. […]

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

On Michael’s site he might use

There are 23 posts previously published on May 10th

2023Lying, Hallucinating? I, MuddGPT Sigh, one cannot avoid The Topic, the Only Thing as it has been grailed. At least it provides fodder for some mocking. It’s so easy even with the merest of ChatGPT et al interaction to respond under the influence of the Weizenbaum effect made visible in the verbs we choose. And like Laura Czerniewicz wrote […] &amp#x27A1;
2020Never Motherless Mothers’ Day when your mother has passed on… there are no flowers to send, no cards to mail, no phone calls. But that does not mean nothing to do (not like not writing too many double negatives!). The first Mothers Day after mom passed on, in my post I lifted the lyrics from the song […] &amp#x27A1;
2017Exploring a Markdown Converter Warning: possible technical jargon will follow, all efforts are being made to keep it to a minimum. In our recent presentation at the 2017 Creative Commons Summit I attempted to explain how the content source for the Certificates lives as Markdown format in GitHub (that’s minus two jargon points). Since we have a group of […] &amp#x27A1;
2016Vestiges and Prospects One day I wake up with a thought. Actually, it does not pop in just like that. I am not a cartoon character with a light bulb over my head. The thought starts as a background hum, a slow buzzing sound that might be calling your name, or maybe it just is noise. Something outside. […] &amp#x27A1; Certifications Remixed: Notes for DC Meeting This is a summary of my notes made in preparation for the May 2016 project meeting. Part of our pre-work for the first project meeting (held May 11-13, 2016 in Washington DC) we were asked to review a number of existing certification programs to find elements we would want to “remix” into the Creative Commons […] &amp#x27A1;
2015Cookies and Metal Airline Knives It’s taken me 51 years to get around to baking cookies. Honoring Mother’s Day and my mom’s own tradition it seemed time to try. As a diabetic, chocolate chip cookies don’t work too well (yeah I know there is imitation chocolate), but recently I noticed in the inside of the Quaker Oats bin was a […] &amp#x27A1; This One Time in #DS106 Camp We Went So Rhizomatically Headless Whilst passing through various discussions, tweet streams, blog posts about education, I end up feeling like Michelle Flaherty because I am always reaching for my experience and examples from ds106 (I won’t embed the video 😉 While not much actively involved lately, since 2011, I have been an open participant, a face to face course […] &amp#x27A1;
2013A Year of Breadlike Syllabus Making for ds106 cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Little Wide World During a presentation last month for the TCC World Online Conference a participant noted in the chat with some irony, that despite the unconventional form and function of ds106 I pointed them to a traditional (long) syllabus for my 2013 class. […] &amp#x27A1; Famous MOOCsters of EDULANDIA Because Audrey asked… https://twitter.com/audreywatters/status/332892228722765824 Perhaps monstering soon at http://moocthulhu.com/ Look closely into the eye of Cthulhu to see its true intent. Share this barking on social media &amp#x27A1;
2011Who’s the Baboon? I picked up Sands of Kalahari at a thrift store, with a set of other books chosen merely because they looked “old” and I wanted a classic looking row on my shelf. For some reason I started thumbing through it, and fell right into an engrossing story. At a surface level, it looks like most […] &amp#x27A1; May Story a Day #10: I’m As Bored As Hell… 10 days in to one digital story per day in May, 10 stories done. Still going strong. Today was a play with something I wanted to try for a while, an overdub of my own audio over a classic scene, where I change the script to say what I want it to say. My timing […] &amp#x27A1; Dogfographic I get a steady stream of those mass-emailed requests to write blog post for products or do link sharing, and 99.9% of them go in the poop bag. Sometimes one comes along that gets past the guard dog, and the message from Matt was obviously written by someone who has read my stuff. His site […] &amp#x27A1;
2010The Thing Formerly Known As Blogging About Northern Voice 2010 cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Vancouver is indeed a special place for me. I’ll take any bait to attend a conference there, though no incentive is needed for Northern Voice. It always has been, and even with its growth this year to over 500 attendees, more than your garden variety slap a name […] &amp#x27A1; Bring Out Your Blogs mashup of flickr cc licensed photos by digital_trash and by h.koppdelaney I had a blast with this session from Northern Voice that I arm twisted Brian Lamb and Chris Lott to be part of, which I had pitched originally as Every few months some pundit posts something online stating that blogging is dead (invariably posted […] &amp#x27A1;
2009Mind Numbing Stupidity of Blocking (“that’s entertainment”) I’ve never suffered the degradation of working in an organization that acted as my Net Mommy– one that told me I was not old enough or mature enough to monitor my own internet activity. I pity my colleagues in Australia where, as one emailed me tonight, some arbitrary machine of divine intelligence has decided that […] &amp#x27A1; Only Solar Action is Virtual GE SmartGrid Virtual Solar Energy by cogdogblog posted 10 May ’09, 8.54pm MDT PST on flickr I’d seen this pass by the stream of cool technologies, but while visiting Bryan Alexander, he printed out the correct picture to generate this fun bit of video projection from the GE Smart Grid site ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid When you hold […] &amp#x27A1; If YouTube is not weird enough, yooouuutuuube it Watch any YouTube video in a flowing stream of frame shots? Try Yooouuutuuube. It’s better seen than described- the spaced out version of Dominoe: linktribution to Mashable who thankfully do not obfuscate their post URLs with google feedproxy gunk in their RSS feeds Share this barking on social media &amp#x27A1;
2008Take Control of Your Twitter! You’re hooked on twitter. At first you thought it was the dumbest thing anyone can do, but next thing you know, you have 8000 updates. You have signed the Twitter Life Cycle summit log. And them, out of the blue something goes “technically wrong”. Or as more often happens, you are paging through your tweets […] &amp#x27A1;
2005Staying In the Clips flickr foto Road 1 Skin 0available on my flickr This is trivial as far as road rash– just my mental record of what it means when you are learning to bicycle with cleated shoes…. I keep meaning to write some relative posts about my recent work, but keep getting distracted by every day antics. And […] &amp#x27A1; Jeffrey Stone, Do You Think I am A Professional Moron? I’m a fan of Wired, sifting through the slick ads for the sometimes good writing… and I lifted the Wired. Tired. Expired. theme for a recent presentation. But however “cool” a magazine may pass itself off for, underneath it is a business and there are bean counters and bottom liners working to milk my money. […] &amp#x27A1; While I Was Sleeping (I Was Not Charging Your iPod) I was happily iPodding my bicycle route home when my Shuffle went south, blinking amber lights. The battery drained, cutting the Clash off in mid song. Wow, after getting used to the audio track while biking, the lack of it was, well deafening. It turns out when I plugged it into my iBook at night, […] &amp#x27A1;
2004Spammers 12 / Me Zero It was all for nought. My research, attempts to tidy up the movabletype holes, changing names of comment scripts, did squat. I just combed through and deleted 12 blog comment spams, generously sent in a swift spurt, all related somehow to animals, by guess. I am ready to raise the white flag and kill the […] &amp#x27A1; mcli Forum Spring 2004 Just posted the web version of our once per semester publication, the mcli Forum which our office has been publishing in print and paper since 1993 (before 2000 it was the Labyrinth-Forum). We have a mixture of faculty, guest, and our own staff authored articles that highlight teaching, learning, assessment, and technology efforts at Maricopa. […] &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.