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 17 posts previously published on July 11th

2016Force 10 From Mom Memory Alister MacLean’s Force 10 From Navarone is another old hardback I bought at the Senior Thrift store in Pine, Arizona mainly as decoration for my bookshelf. But like Casino Royale and Sands of the Kalahari I end of enjoying them more off the shelf. Published in 1968, this version’s pages are yellowed; it is stamped […] Sketching a Process for Sharing / Getting Feedback on Certification Drafts Our team is actively refining the specifications for the Creative Commons Core Certification and the derivative versions for Libraries, Government, and Education based on discussions our meetings in May in Washington DC. In that meeting we worked from a Draft 1.1 version developed in May 2015 by a Creative Commons team, represented in a spreadsheet […] The Ill-Logic of “All Lives Matter” (from a white guy) Nothing I can write here can do a better job of taking down the assertion “All Lives Matter” than the brilliant 3 panel comic by Kris Straub. The clear message it fits into three panels of a drawing needs little explaining. Does it? Can anyone refute this? Yet the response “All Lives Matter”, sounding purely […]
2013ds106 Daily Create Challenge (11): Poetry From the Tabloids All the news that is fit to make up… Today’s Daily Create Challenge was writing something by remixing content from different sources: Find 3 news stories. Use words from second paragraph of each, make 3 stanzas of 3 lines, Be More [Cog] Dog This video shared by my newest, bestest friend in the UK, Mariana, captures my life’s philosophy @cogdog I hope you can see in US. New UK Ad – you may enjoy 🙂 http://t.co/v0zq6Rfl56 — Mariana (@mdvfunes) July 11, 2013 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMzgl0nFj3s It’s pretty simple, eh? And if you really want to get your Dog Game in […]
2012These Five Guys Are Gonna Chew You Out: Daily Create Challenge My diabolical plan to pump up the activity of the Daily Create seems to be working; The first day of the Daily Create Challenge is not even over, and I see already 21 tornados submitted (the challenge was to draw a tornado). I’ve been growling and calling people out, daring them to do 7 Daily […] Building WordPress Admin Tool for Building Daily Creates Last January, Tim Owens did a masterful job of assembling the Daily Create site out of a premium theme (Salutation), a mix of plugins (including Awesome Flickr Gallery, Tubepress, and Gravity Forms), etc– and no custom code. When I arrived at UMW in February, I offered to take over the creation of the challenges. It […] Rare Book Covers Limited editions of this holistic and cleanly book are available! This is for a brand new ds106 Design Assignment: Weird Book Room: The Abebooks Weird Book Room lists a collection of titles so farcical you would think they are made up, but they are not. “Grandma’s Dead: Breaking Bad News With Baby Animals”, “Beyond Leaf […]
2010L(3)E(1)A(1)R(1)N(2)I(1)N(2)G(2) (and Scrabble) cc licensed flickr photo shared by red5standingby A recent interest timesuck addiction um,, interest has been playing Words With Friends… with friends. I’ve been on a lucky streak, and have beaten a few people who are smarter and more educated (people who actually use words like “epistemology” in regular conversation. But its really not about […] The New Rules of the Road for Email Marketing Apparently the new rules of the road for email “marketing” (the quotes are not strictly necessary, but I don’t care) is that the people who spit it out can opt you in w/o asking as long as they let you opt out. I appreciate the opt out, but I don’t appreciate having to process crap […]
2007Sit, Avatar! Sit, Avatar! posted 11 Jul ’07, 6.54pm MDT PST on flickr I was experimenting today with doing some live video streaming from my laptop into Second Life. That darned dog just refused to listen to my commands. Some virtual dogs are just like their real life versions. Share this barking on social media Expertise, Idiocy, Monkeys: Write Blog Postings and Articles Summary: Jakob Nielsen tosses gasoline on the flames of the blogosphere by claiming blog posting dilutes an arbitrary measure of “expertise”. A thousand blog monkeys were deeply hurt. Oh Jacob Nielsen, you had to know upon writing “Write Articles, Not Blog Postings” the ire and furor it would stir up…. well, since he likely only […]
2005News Flash! MERLOT Peer Reviews 8 Year Old Project I recently got an email notification that a peer review has been done of a former project that is available in MERLOT. While it is listed as being loaded there in 2002, actually Negative Reinforcement University (NRU) was developed as a CD-ROM in 1996 and converted to the web in 1997. Although I’ve not even […] Living at the Crossroads: EDUCAUSE IT Institute This morning I turned the CogDogBlog firehouse of instructional technology for my opening presentation at the EDUCAUSE Instructional Technology Leadership Program 2005 held at Penn State University. I was asked to cover emerging technologies and issues of instructional design. Firstly, and I started off saying this, I was rather intimidated as the level of expertise […]
2004Cocktails Needed Feed Browsing sites registering as users of Feed2JS I discovered this morning that there is now a feed to provide updates on the Cocktail of the Week. Who would know there was such a thing? Apparently David Berghouse has been publishing this site from Australia since 1995, quite a nice stretch! Good on ya! FYI, the […]
2003Because They Can… One might ask why someone would use or create something like BlogChatter – Realtime Weblog Aggregation and the answer is the topic of this post (same answer to the philosophical question, “why do dogs lick themselves?”). Blogchatter allows you to peek into the fast paced universe of weblogs (or blogosphere) by providing a rolling log […] After the Fuss Wow, it is not even 15 minutes following our teleconference on “What’s The Fuss about RSS?” and already George has posted some great summary points, elearnspace blog: The Fuss about RSS – Summary. How did I know? I glanced at my NetNewsWire RSS aggregatos and saw not only George’s new blog entry, but one from […]

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

On Michael’s site he might use

There are 17 posts previously published on July 11th

2016Force 10 From Mom Memory Alister MacLean’s Force 10 From Navarone is another old hardback I bought at the Senior Thrift store in Pine, Arizona mainly as decoration for my bookshelf. But like Casino Royale and Sands of the Kalahari I end of enjoying them more off the shelf. Published in 1968, this version’s pages are yellowed; it is stamped […] &amp#x27A1; Sketching a Process for Sharing / Getting Feedback on Certification Drafts Our team is actively refining the specifications for the Creative Commons Core Certification and the derivative versions for Libraries, Government, and Education based on discussions our meetings in May in Washington DC. In that meeting we worked from a Draft 1.1 version developed in May 2015 by a Creative Commons team, represented in a spreadsheet […] &amp#x27A1; The Ill-Logic of “All Lives Matter” (from a white guy) Nothing I can write here can do a better job of taking down the assertion “All Lives Matter” than the brilliant 3 panel comic by Kris Straub. The clear message it fits into three panels of a drawing needs little explaining. Does it? Can anyone refute this? Yet the response “All Lives Matter”, sounding purely […] &amp#x27A1;
2013ds106 Daily Create Challenge (11): Poetry From the Tabloids All the news that is fit to make up… Today’s Daily Create Challenge was writing something by remixing content from different sources: Find 3 news stories. Use words from second paragraph of each, make 3 stanzas of 3 lines, &amp#x27A1; Be More [Cog] Dog This video shared by my newest, bestest friend in the UK, Mariana, captures my life’s philosophy @cogdog I hope you can see in US. New UK Ad – you may enjoy 🙂 http://t.co/v0zq6Rfl56 — Mariana (@mdvfunes) July 11, 2013 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMzgl0nFj3s It’s pretty simple, eh? And if you really want to get your Dog Game in […] &amp#x27A1;
2012These Five Guys Are Gonna Chew You Out: Daily Create Challenge My diabolical plan to pump up the activity of the Daily Create seems to be working; The first day of the Daily Create Challenge is not even over, and I see already 21 tornados submitted (the challenge was to draw a tornado). I’ve been growling and calling people out, daring them to do 7 Daily […] &amp#x27A1; Building WordPress Admin Tool for Building Daily Creates Last January, Tim Owens did a masterful job of assembling the Daily Create site out of a premium theme (Salutation), a mix of plugins (including Awesome Flickr Gallery, Tubepress, and Gravity Forms), etc– and no custom code. When I arrived at UMW in February, I offered to take over the creation of the challenges. It […] &amp#x27A1; Rare Book Covers Limited editions of this holistic and cleanly book are available! This is for a brand new ds106 Design Assignment: Weird Book Room: The Abebooks Weird Book Room lists a collection of titles so farcical you would think they are made up, but they are not. “Grandma’s Dead: Breaking Bad News With Baby Animals”, “Beyond Leaf […] &amp#x27A1;
2010L(3)E(1)A(1)R(1)N(2)I(1)N(2)G(2) (and Scrabble) cc licensed flickr photo shared by red5standingby A recent interest timesuck addiction um,, interest has been playing Words With Friends… with friends. I’ve been on a lucky streak, and have beaten a few people who are smarter and more educated (people who actually use words like “epistemology” in regular conversation. But its really not about […] &amp#x27A1; The New Rules of the Road for Email Marketing Apparently the new rules of the road for email “marketing” (the quotes are not strictly necessary, but I don’t care) is that the people who spit it out can opt you in w/o asking as long as they let you opt out. I appreciate the opt out, but I don’t appreciate having to process crap […] &amp#x27A1;
2007Sit, Avatar! Sit, Avatar! posted 11 Jul ’07, 6.54pm MDT PST on flickr I was experimenting today with doing some live video streaming from my laptop into Second Life. That darned dog just refused to listen to my commands. Some virtual dogs are just like their real life versions. Share this barking on social media &amp#x27A1; Expertise, Idiocy, Monkeys: Write Blog Postings and Articles Summary: Jakob Nielsen tosses gasoline on the flames of the blogosphere by claiming blog posting dilutes an arbitrary measure of “expertise”. A thousand blog monkeys were deeply hurt. Oh Jacob Nielsen, you had to know upon writing “Write Articles, Not Blog Postings” the ire and furor it would stir up…. well, since he likely only […] &amp#x27A1;
2005News Flash! MERLOT Peer Reviews 8 Year Old Project I recently got an email notification that a peer review has been done of a former project that is available in MERLOT. While it is listed as being loaded there in 2002, actually Negative Reinforcement University (NRU) was developed as a CD-ROM in 1996 and converted to the web in 1997. Although I’ve not even […] &amp#x27A1; Living at the Crossroads: EDUCAUSE IT Institute This morning I turned the CogDogBlog firehouse of instructional technology for my opening presentation at the EDUCAUSE Instructional Technology Leadership Program 2005 held at Penn State University. I was asked to cover emerging technologies and issues of instructional design. Firstly, and I started off saying this, I was rather intimidated as the level of expertise […] &amp#x27A1;
2004Cocktails Needed Feed Browsing sites registering as users of Feed2JS I discovered this morning that there is now a feed to provide updates on the Cocktail of the Week. Who would know there was such a thing? Apparently David Berghouse has been publishing this site from Australia since 1995, quite a nice stretch! Good on ya! FYI, the […] &amp#x27A1;
2003Because They Can… One might ask why someone would use or create something like BlogChatter – Realtime Weblog Aggregation and the answer is the topic of this post (same answer to the philosophical question, “why do dogs lick themselves?”). Blogchatter allows you to peek into the fast paced universe of weblogs (or blogosphere) by providing a rolling log […] &amp#x27A1; After the Fuss Wow, it is not even 15 minutes following our teleconference on “What’s The Fuss about RSS?” and already George has posted some great summary points, elearnspace blog: The Fuss about RSS – Summary. How did I know? I glanced at my NetNewsWire RSS aggregatos and saw not only George’s new blog entry, but one from […] &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.