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 18 posts previously published on May 24th

2024Wrenching Around Google URLs, Get Your Old Skool Search Back (for now) Oh my, the Ai sauce is oozing from Google’s search, for which many are predicting the Fu of Google Search is gone. Yeah, it’s a mess, but frankly, I still have my fleet of hone bookmarklet gizmos and customized search engines that I still get effective use out of. Quite a few of the wrenches […]
2023Twitter Sez DS106 Daily Create Get Off My Lawn! The Musky Dark Lord of Twitter has finally cast the fun loving, roll-in-the-grass-like-a-happy-dog DS106 Daily Create off of the tweeting lawn. This marks the end of 3811 successive never missed a single day of tweeting fun creative challenges openly and the last 2813 of them had, until today, been able to have their responses collected […]
2021WritingHTML: An Open Online “course” (or not?) Launched in 1994 According to the 25 of EdTech Years Goggles, 1994 was the year of BBS. The web itself came to be a thing in 1995. But you’ve heard it all, right? My foray into what I might claim as an open course on the web has been dangling around that drafty place of drafts described by […]
2018Blog Posts As Old Concrete Slabs or Alive in the Cracks In Between? My favorite blog posts are not spawned by Carefully Planned Brilliant Ahas but often as happy accidents out of day to day tinkerings. And here I ponder the difference of seeing blog posts as things written in stone that slide down the conveyer belt of archives vs things that are organic and come back to […] A Home for the Puerto Rico Connection Podcast Of the nature of old school blogging is quaint and dated, podcasting may not be far behind. Ever since the start of a podcasting project interrupted by a hurricane Antonio Vantaggiato and I have been hodgepodging a podcast series we call “The Puerto Rico Connection” (yes the play on the movie title was deliberate but […]
2013Here We Go Again, Minor Update for Flickr CC Attribution Helper cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Tom Sigh, I found a case where my script was not working (it was for photo ownsers who never set themselves a nickname). I had to dig in deeper than I have gone with XPath, and was mostly my own ignorance as to whay I […] Twilighting The Poem A poem made of TZ episod titles? Oh yeah, brought on by Todd Conaway. Mine is called Be Sure The Job Is Done… I Shot An Arrow Into The Air And When The Sky Was Opened The Four Of Us Are Dying Where Is Everybody? You Drive The Fear A Hundred Yards Over The Rim […] Oh, Cole. We Always Push Back… That Means Bring It. cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by craig.letourneau.photography I’ve known Cole Camplese for some time, we’ve blogged together, presented together, hung out all night after dull conferences together, drank together, I’ve dropped in and stayed at his house several times. I can remember the first time I came across his work- […]
2011May Story a Day #24 Grassy GIFs Today’s supposed digital story is an experiment in creating animated GIFs, which is totally legal in counting as a story! I did this by using the consecutive shooting mode on my Canon T1i, then importing into PhotoShop (“import as Stack” under scripts in File menu), and finally using the animation palette to do final tweaks. […] May Story a Day #22: Get Your Kicks I was behind the wheel all day (and then some) last night to go from Strawberry AZ to northern CA, and cruised I-40, paralleling the ghost highway of Route 66. Somewhere near the Oatman turnoff (a worthy side trip if you every are in the area and want to see a funky place), I stopped […]
2010Check Out My [Air] Stash… Hey Bud, you gotta see what’s on my Air Stash… just don’t let Mr Hand get the SSID… It’s hard not to reach for this metaphor with something called the “Air Stash“. My NMC colleague Keene Haywood told me about this a few weeks ago. It’s described as a “wireless flash drive” for your iPhone/iPad, […] Jared’s Five Minute Masterpiece You gotta tweet what you ask for. I believe I am mixing my metaphors, or just babbling at the end of a full weekend, in denial of the looming Monday ahead. That’s what makes it nice to have something novel to play with. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I’ve known Jared Bendis since […]
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2006Birthday Dog flickr foto Brother and Sisteravailable on flickr Today is Cadu’s birthday! She (black lab on the left) and Mickey (right) were from the same litter, though differed in just about every other form factor. Cadu will be 5 today; Mickey is forever frozen at 2 and a half. Doggie party tonight! Share this barking on […]
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and the default value, the link at the end is invisible.

On Michael’s site he might use

There are 18 posts previously published on May 24th

2024Wrenching Around Google URLs, Get Your Old Skool Search Back (for now) Oh my, the Ai sauce is oozing from Google’s search, for which many are predicting the Fu of Google Search is gone. Yeah, it’s a mess, but frankly, I still have my fleet of hone bookmarklet gizmos and customized search engines that I still get effective use out of. Quite a few of the wrenches […] &amp#x27A1;
2023Twitter Sez DS106 Daily Create Get Off My Lawn! The Musky Dark Lord of Twitter has finally cast the fun loving, roll-in-the-grass-like-a-happy-dog DS106 Daily Create off of the tweeting lawn. This marks the end of 3811 successive never missed a single day of tweeting fun creative challenges openly and the last 2813 of them had, until today, been able to have their responses collected […] &amp#x27A1;
2021WritingHTML: An Open Online “course” (or not?) Launched in 1994 According to the 25 of EdTech Years Goggles, 1994 was the year of BBS. The web itself came to be a thing in 1995. But you’ve heard it all, right? My foray into what I might claim as an open course on the web has been dangling around that drafty place of drafts described by […] &amp#x27A1;
2018Blog Posts As Old Concrete Slabs or Alive in the Cracks In Between? My favorite blog posts are not spawned by Carefully Planned Brilliant Ahas but often as happy accidents out of day to day tinkerings. And here I ponder the difference of seeing blog posts as things written in stone that slide down the conveyer belt of archives vs things that are organic and come back to […] &amp#x27A1; A Home for the Puerto Rico Connection Podcast Of the nature of old school blogging is quaint and dated, podcasting may not be far behind. Ever since the start of a podcasting project interrupted by a hurricane Antonio Vantaggiato and I have been hodgepodging a podcast series we call “The Puerto Rico Connection” (yes the play on the movie title was deliberate but […] &amp#x27A1;
2013Here We Go Again, Minor Update for Flickr CC Attribution Helper cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Tom Sigh, I found a case where my script was not working (it was for photo ownsers who never set themselves a nickname). I had to dig in deeper than I have gone with XPath, and was mostly my own ignorance as to whay I […] &amp#x27A1; Twilighting The Poem A poem made of TZ episod titles? Oh yeah, brought on by Todd Conaway. Mine is called Be Sure The Job Is Done… I Shot An Arrow Into The Air And When The Sky Was Opened The Four Of Us Are Dying Where Is Everybody? You Drive The Fear A Hundred Yards Over The Rim […] &amp#x27A1; Oh, Cole. We Always Push Back… That Means Bring It. cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by craig.letourneau.photography I’ve known Cole Camplese for some time, we’ve blogged together, presented together, hung out all night after dull conferences together, drank together, I’ve dropped in and stayed at his house several times. I can remember the first time I came across his work- […] &amp#x27A1;
2011May Story a Day #24 Grassy GIFs Today’s supposed digital story is an experiment in creating animated GIFs, which is totally legal in counting as a story! I did this by using the consecutive shooting mode on my Canon T1i, then importing into PhotoShop (“import as Stack” under scripts in File menu), and finally using the animation palette to do final tweaks. […] &amp#x27A1; May Story a Day #22: Get Your Kicks I was behind the wheel all day (and then some) last night to go from Strawberry AZ to northern CA, and cruised I-40, paralleling the ghost highway of Route 66. Somewhere near the Oatman turnoff (a worthy side trip if you every are in the area and want to see a funky place), I stopped […] &amp#x27A1;
2010Check Out My [Air] Stash… Hey Bud, you gotta see what’s on my Air Stash… just don’t let Mr Hand get the SSID… It’s hard not to reach for this metaphor with something called the “Air Stash“. My NMC colleague Keene Haywood told me about this a few weeks ago. It’s described as a “wireless flash drive” for your iPhone/iPad, […] &amp#x27A1; Jared’s Five Minute Masterpiece You gotta tweet what you ask for. I believe I am mixing my metaphors, or just babbling at the end of a full weekend, in denial of the looming Monday ahead. That’s what makes it nice to have something novel to play with. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I’ve known Jared Bendis since […] &amp#x27A1;
2009Live/Die By Those Short URLs cc licensed flickr photo shared by Andrew Mason Ouch, indeed. Once upon a pre-twitter time there was but a few services that offered easy ways to turn long ugly URLs into shorter ones. I might be hard pressed to find someone that has not clicked a TinyURL and I remember at least 5 years ago […] &amp#x27A1;
2006Birthday Dog flickr foto Brother and Sisteravailable on flickr Today is Cadu’s birthday! She (black lab on the left) and Mickey (right) were from the same litter, though differed in just about every other form factor. Cadu will be 5 today; Mickey is forever frozen at 2 and a half. Doggie party tonight! Share this barking on […] &amp#x27A1;
2005Putting the Blog Before The Horse and The Electric Magic of Flickr Flying home from San Diego to Phoenix after my piece in San Diego State University workshops this week, two, maybe three not so brilliant ideas floated in my head. Perhaps the Wrong Tactic On Intro Blog Workshops In the morning of the first day’s sessions we had all participants create new weblogs at Blogger. It […] &amp#x27A1; WebQuest Overview (SDSU Workshops) Webquest Overview (Bernie Dodge) The father of WebQuests…. What is a WebQuest? A structured inquiry-based activity where the most of all information students use comes from the web. Ideally it is wrapped around a do-able, authenitc task. Life and Work are getting more complex, not less Making sense of the new taking a stand on […] &amp#x27A1; Technology Firehose at San Diego State I’m at day two for an invited participation in an “Emerging Trends Workshop” for some 50 plus educators at San Diego State University. I was invited by the “father” of WebQuests Bernie Dodge, who emailed a few weeks ago, “Can CogDogBlog Come and Play in San Diego”? Bernie is one of the pioneers in Educational […] &amp#x27A1; Learning Objects R.I.P. Did you catch the obits? Teemu Leinonen, one of the members of the FLOSSE Posse has bravely cast out the notice in “Learning objects – Is the King naked?”. He argues that the IEEE definitions of “any entity, digital or non digital hat may be used for learning, education or teaching” is broad enough to […] &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.