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 25 posts previously published on February 5th

2025Last of the Aisquith Street Herondorfs One major branch of my family loses a key limb yet many more now are now connected, growing. On Saturday, I made the journey down to that trouble some country that a one time was united, to drop into home town Baltimore to be a my Aunt Dorothy’s funeral. She was the last living of […]
202424 Would Have Been 74: Back to Carlins Pool My calendar reminds me today marks my parent’s wedding anniversary- they were kind and made the math easy by having a wedding in 1950. I returned to the audio I recorded with Mom in 2009, amongst be favorite memorabilia is the sound of her voice, describing to me how Alyce and Morris met in Baltimore. […]
2023Between the 5th and the 8th, 2023 Version It’s that time of year, with a calendar reminder or not, to think of the span between these three days of February. Three days and many years now. February 5, 1950–now 73 years ago–marks the date Alyce Herondorf married Morris Levine and set out on that life together that gave me, my sisters, my brothers, […]
2022Hey, What’s That Sound [Around]? Heard it on the #DLINQDigDetox Oops. This post was not on the drafts I store in the back corners of my brain. And only after typing a first title (because all my posts need titles first) (well after I search for the photo) of “Sound Around” did my neurons flip on the 60’s vintage Buffalo Springfield track. Plus adding the […]
2021For Your 71st Anniversary All I Got You Was a Blog Post Today would be well heck always is my parent’s wedding anniversary. 71 years ago today, Mickey and Alyce got hitched. Married in 1950, their anniversary math was always easy, but damn, the number is getting big. I could tell the story how they met at the pool I believe at Druid Hill park (or was […]
2020Could Have Been 70 The math on my parent’s anniversary was always easy since they were married in 1950– on February 5, you just needed to subtract 50. Today would have been a party for their 70th. Alas, no party when they are both gone. But twenty years ago it was, my sisters and I had a party for […]
2019We’re in the Store! This was way overdue for our millions of fans, but this podcast is finally available in the iTunes Podcast Store.... Slowing Down a Daily _____ Site It can take a lot of [insane?] effort to publish something like the DS106 Daily Create every day, but there seems to be enough hands on the wheel to do it daily. I’m not sure where or who did the asking, but I recall being asked if the Daily Blank theme it uses could be […]
2016On Old School Social Bookmarking I’ve found much resonance in this observation someone (I cannot remember who) shared with me — “Your mobile phone area code indicated where you lived in 2008”. It sounds odd until you recall what your own number is. Likewise, I think, you can gauge someone’s early web experience is (the kind that was Web 2.0 […] Ooh Ooh Mr Kotter! I Know How To Optimize My GIFs! Here, to demonstrate some tricks and insights into making animated GIFs, I shall reveal my cultural antiquity with a reference to the Arnold Horshack enthusiastic hand raise from the TV show Welcome Back Kotter (while cheesy at least for that era, a positive image about school?) I was recently asked by a colleague if I […] Would Have Been 66 They sure made the anniversary math easy by getting married in 1950. Today. 66 years ago. All I got was a calendar pop-up reminder. And a happy quick mind memory trip, with some rummaging through what feels like too small a set of digital photos. It can be hard to really imagine your parents as […]
2015One Click Featuring in WordPress Sites In consulting You Show participants on their site organization, I am trying to help them see there are more opportunities for the front page than the long river of reverse chronological ordered posts. Many themes (like the Virtue Theme on the You Show) give you an option to display posts from a category, rather than […]
201450 Ways Gone Mobile I can’t let the old project go. 50+ Web Ways to Tell a Story started as a workshop/presentation for some educators in Australia in 2007 (the first wiki still gets hit). The idea was to do more than list tools, but also to promote a sensible story making process, aimed at using +/- 50 free […]
2013E.T. MOOC Inspired by tonight’s #etmooc live animated GIF variety show from Jim Groom, Tom Woodward, Michael Branson-Smith, and Brian Lamb, I could not help but stay up later than advisable making a GIF. It’s a break in the action from grading. No, it’s just like an idea that gets in your brain, and will not stop […] Minor Update CC Attribution Helper Script (in which it diagnoses itself) cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by EMSL In the carefully controlled laboratory where I do my coding… no in actuality more like a scene from some ghastly middle school cafeteria food fight. This all started when a friend showed me a creative commons licensed photo that my creative commons attribution […]
2011Four Icon Challenge For ds106 Visual Assignment Four Icon Challenge Reduce a movie, story, or event into it’s basic elements, then take those visuals and reduce them further to simple icons. I am a horrible free drawer, so I set up a set of frames in PhotoShop, imported some images found (somewhere on the internet), and did some […] Scary Stories from Strawberry cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Are you scared yet? No? Well you should have tuned in to our late night live radio show on #ds106radio — with Bryan Alexander visiting me here, it was the perfect plan to hatch. Sadly he seems to have been adbucted […] Are You Laughing at Me? Trying out One Shot from the set of the Visual Assignments in ds106. Take a single photograph. Chop it up comic book style to create tension and narrative This original is from my 2008 visit to Iceland, with the horse Nonni in the background laughing (or yawning at me). cc licensed flickr photo shared by […]
2007Writing To My Blog with WriteToMyBlog Talk about serendipity! I can count on one or two paws the number of times I've clicked on a Google AdSense ad. But in reading my inbox in Gmail, someone wriote about blog writing, and there was a link to Free Web Word Processor for your Blog. Â I bit and look what I got!Â Â it's […]
2006Rightly Writely I repeat myself, but wow, do I love Writely, the shared web word processor. A few nights ago, I go an email invite to edit a Writely document– this came from Phil Long at MIT, and I followed the link in to edit a document we has creating to use as a demo presentation. How […] Google: The Shortest Distance Between Two Clicks Last Friday was our February meeting of our Ocotillo Online Learning Group — the theme was digital audio and podcasting (look for audio to be posted Tuesday as the files are two big to FTP viq dial-up connection at my cabin). I observed something interesting that registered as an observation. One of our faculty was […] Two Workshops on Using Online Discussions We were please to have as a guest to Maricopa on Januarry 27, Alice Bedard-Vorhees, from the Colorado Community Colleges Online. Alice is an experience online teacher, and was the recipient of the first Cross-Papers Fellowship from the League of Innovation in the Community College and K. Patricia Cross. She is an expert on engaging […] Commenting As Blogging I’ve often asserted that blogging is a social process, that the mere publishing, caterwauling, prettying up templates, is only a piece of it– blogging is also participating in other people’s blogs. There is nothing that will energize a budding blogger more than getting feedback, and the impact is even larger when it comes from someone […]
2005Roll Your Own MT Search Bookmarklet Now that the Furl-Delicious-Frassle-CiteULike-Connotea-Bag Bookmarklet Tool (a simepl web form to help you build a one click browser bar tool for adding web sites to various collections) seems to be working– I decided to make another tool. This one helps you create a browser bar button for quick searching of any MovableType weblog, as described […]
2004Kicking the XServe As the blog turns… Since our MovableType move last month to a new server, a shiny Apple XServe, I’d been noticing that email notifications of trackbacks and comments reported not the IP address of the person who had sent the comment/trackback, but the IP address of the server itself. Hard to block spam roaches by […]

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

On Michael’s site he might use

There are 25 posts previously published on February 5th

2025Last of the Aisquith Street Herondorfs One major branch of my family loses a key limb yet many more now are now connected, growing. On Saturday, I made the journey down to that trouble some country that a one time was united, to drop into home town Baltimore to be a my Aunt Dorothy’s funeral. She was the last living of […] &amp#x27A1;
202424 Would Have Been 74: Back to Carlins Pool My calendar reminds me today marks my parent’s wedding anniversary- they were kind and made the math easy by having a wedding in 1950. I returned to the audio I recorded with Mom in 2009, amongst be favorite memorabilia is the sound of her voice, describing to me how Alyce and Morris met in Baltimore. […] &amp#x27A1;
2023Between the 5th and the 8th, 2023 Version It’s that time of year, with a calendar reminder or not, to think of the span between these three days of February. Three days and many years now. February 5, 1950–now 73 years ago–marks the date Alyce Herondorf married Morris Levine and set out on that life together that gave me, my sisters, my brothers, […] &amp#x27A1;
2022Hey, What’s That Sound [Around]? Heard it on the #DLINQDigDetox Oops. This post was not on the drafts I store in the back corners of my brain. And only after typing a first title (because all my posts need titles first) (well after I search for the photo) of “Sound Around” did my neurons flip on the 60’s vintage Buffalo Springfield track. Plus adding the […] &amp#x27A1;
2021For Your 71st Anniversary All I Got You Was a Blog Post Today would be well heck always is my parent’s wedding anniversary. 71 years ago today, Mickey and Alyce got hitched. Married in 1950, their anniversary math was always easy, but damn, the number is getting big. I could tell the story how they met at the pool I believe at Druid Hill park (or was […] &amp#x27A1;
2020Could Have Been 70 The math on my parent’s anniversary was always easy since they were married in 1950– on February 5, you just needed to subtract 50. Today would have been a party for their 70th. Alas, no party when they are both gone. But twenty years ago it was, my sisters and I had a party for […] &amp#x27A1;
2019We’re in the Store! This was way overdue for our millions of fans, but this podcast is finally available in the iTunes Podcast Store.... &amp#x27A1; Slowing Down a Daily _____ Site It can take a lot of [insane?] effort to publish something like the DS106 Daily Create every day, but there seems to be enough hands on the wheel to do it daily. I’m not sure where or who did the asking, but I recall being asked if the Daily Blank theme it uses could be […] &amp#x27A1;
2016On Old School Social Bookmarking I’ve found much resonance in this observation someone (I cannot remember who) shared with me — “Your mobile phone area code indicated where you lived in 2008”. It sounds odd until you recall what your own number is. Likewise, I think, you can gauge someone’s early web experience is (the kind that was Web 2.0 […] &amp#x27A1; Ooh Ooh Mr Kotter! I Know How To Optimize My GIFs! Here, to demonstrate some tricks and insights into making animated GIFs, I shall reveal my cultural antiquity with a reference to the Arnold Horshack enthusiastic hand raise from the TV show Welcome Back Kotter (while cheesy at least for that era, a positive image about school?) I was recently asked by a colleague if I […] &amp#x27A1; Would Have Been 66 They sure made the anniversary math easy by getting married in 1950. Today. 66 years ago. All I got was a calendar pop-up reminder. And a happy quick mind memory trip, with some rummaging through what feels like too small a set of digital photos. It can be hard to really imagine your parents as […] &amp#x27A1;
2015One Click Featuring in WordPress Sites In consulting You Show participants on their site organization, I am trying to help them see there are more opportunities for the front page than the long river of reverse chronological ordered posts. Many themes (like the Virtue Theme on the You Show) give you an option to display posts from a category, rather than […] &amp#x27A1;
201450 Ways Gone Mobile I can’t let the old project go. 50+ Web Ways to Tell a Story started as a workshop/presentation for some educators in Australia in 2007 (the first wiki still gets hit). The idea was to do more than list tools, but also to promote a sensible story making process, aimed at using +/- 50 free […] &amp#x27A1;
2013E.T. MOOC Inspired by tonight’s #etmooc live animated GIF variety show from Jim Groom, Tom Woodward, Michael Branson-Smith, and Brian Lamb, I could not help but stay up later than advisable making a GIF. It’s a break in the action from grading. No, it’s just like an idea that gets in your brain, and will not stop […] &amp#x27A1; Minor Update CC Attribution Helper Script (in which it diagnoses itself) cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by EMSL In the carefully controlled laboratory where I do my coding… no in actuality more like a scene from some ghastly middle school cafeteria food fight. This all started when a friend showed me a creative commons licensed photo that my creative commons attribution […] &amp#x27A1;
2011Four Icon Challenge For ds106 Visual Assignment Four Icon Challenge Reduce a movie, story, or event into it’s basic elements, then take those visuals and reduce them further to simple icons. I am a horrible free drawer, so I set up a set of frames in PhotoShop, imported some images found (somewhere on the internet), and did some […] &amp#x27A1; Scary Stories from Strawberry cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Are you scared yet? No? Well you should have tuned in to our late night live radio show on #ds106radio — with Bryan Alexander visiting me here, it was the perfect plan to hatch. Sadly he seems to have been adbucted […] &amp#x27A1; Are You Laughing at Me? Trying out One Shot from the set of the Visual Assignments in ds106. Take a single photograph. Chop it up comic book style to create tension and narrative This original is from my 2008 visit to Iceland, with the horse Nonni in the background laughing (or yawning at me). cc licensed flickr photo shared by […] &amp#x27A1;
2007Writing To My Blog with WriteToMyBlog Talk about serendipity! I can count on one or two paws the number of times I've clicked on a Google AdSense ad. But in reading my inbox in Gmail, someone wriote about blog writing, and there was a link to Free Web Word Processor for your Blog. Â I bit and look what I got!Â Â it's […] &amp#x27A1;
2006Rightly Writely I repeat myself, but wow, do I love Writely, the shared web word processor. A few nights ago, I go an email invite to edit a Writely document– this came from Phil Long at MIT, and I followed the link in to edit a document we has creating to use as a demo presentation. How […] &amp#x27A1; Google: The Shortest Distance Between Two Clicks Last Friday was our February meeting of our Ocotillo Online Learning Group — the theme was digital audio and podcasting (look for audio to be posted Tuesday as the files are two big to FTP viq dial-up connection at my cabin). I observed something interesting that registered as an observation. One of our faculty was […] &amp#x27A1; Two Workshops on Using Online Discussions We were please to have as a guest to Maricopa on Januarry 27, Alice Bedard-Vorhees, from the Colorado Community Colleges Online. Alice is an experience online teacher, and was the recipient of the first Cross-Papers Fellowship from the League of Innovation in the Community College and K. Patricia Cross. She is an expert on engaging […] &amp#x27A1; Commenting As Blogging I’ve often asserted that blogging is a social process, that the mere publishing, caterwauling, prettying up templates, is only a piece of it– blogging is also participating in other people’s blogs. There is nothing that will energize a budding blogger more than getting feedback, and the impact is even larger when it comes from someone […] &amp#x27A1;
2005Roll Your Own MT Search Bookmarklet Now that the Furl-Delicious-Frassle-CiteULike-Connotea-Bag Bookmarklet Tool (a simepl web form to help you build a one click browser bar tool for adding web sites to various collections) seems to be working– I decided to make another tool. This one helps you create a browser bar button for quick searching of any MovableType weblog, as described […] &amp#x27A1;
2004Kicking the XServe As the blog turns… Since our MovableType move last month to a new server, a shiny Apple XServe, I’d been noticing that email notifications of trackbacks and comments reported not the IP address of the person who had sent the comment/trackback, but the IP address of the server itself. Hard to block spam roaches by […] &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.