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 20 posts previously published on May 2nd

2025Dad*99 Oh the swirl of blog post ideas I have organized merely as swirls in my brain… will have to wait. My calendar reminded me that May 2 was the birthday of my Dad, Morris Lee Levine, born this day in Newark, New Jersey in 1928… WHAT A MINUTE. That’s a typo, because my human sometimes […]
202498 on the Dad Scale Me and Dad were but 5 days apart on the birthday calendar, aand today, were he here, I’d be calling to tease and say, “How is 98 feel Dad?” There’d be that pause and a throaty left, with something like in reply, “Not bad at all, Junior.” I had a good round of memory sifting […]
2023Dad@97 Happy day of birth “old man” aka Morris aka Mickey aka Dad… This would have been a cake with 97 candles flaming on it. I don’t have to ask ChatCPT to say anything about what it means to remember a loved one. But I did take a black and white (or is it sepia and […]
2021From Snowberry to Dad, Leveling In May 2 is but one the 365 days per year, another block on the calendar, but also it is World Tuna Day. Who knew? Skip on by if you, rare reader, are looking for something difference for me recycling family memories. It’s my blog! This day for me is the marking of my Dad’s birthday, […]
2020Young Dad May 2 marks Dad’s birthday, if he was here I would have called him to ask how it feels to be 94. There’s a challenge in trying to imagine your parents as kids. You come into the world, and there they are, fully formed. Dad was always just Dad, but there’s the few photos I […] Olde Movie Tyme In pandemic times, out of the ordinary things happen. Around the home front last week, as a birthday thing, the family indulged me in watching a few favorite movies I watched repeatedly as a kid on TV in the early 1970s. Apparently my kid days was a long time ago. My movie and music tastes […]
2019Every Open Tab a Curiosity Beckons I’ve mentioned it more than once here, but maybe the best thing I have done to put some serendipity wonder into the daily web browsing experience is installing the Library of Congress Free to Use extension. What it does is simple- each time I open a new tab in Chrome, rather than the white screen […] Tools of Dad I do not need any social media reminder service to tell me who’s birthday is today; May 2 is always etched with being my Dad’s birthday. Today he would have been 93, but alas his odometer ran out at 72. I do this math, and figure out that when my dad was the age I […]
2016Gitting, Forward Version Thinking, Presentations, Huh? This all started with looking at the WordPress site presentation deck Brian Lamb used for a talk last week at Conventry University. There’s a lot more to Brian’s talks than this, but few people title them as well as Ed Tech Isn’t Dead, It Just Smells Funny nor finds the wackiest GIFs. But I’m not […]
2014The Blog Reader I Miss the Most creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Happy 86th Birthday, Dad, another one you missed. And how I miss you in this world. Actually the last one you had was your 75th. And we all knew it was the last. Because of that, I was there to watch him eat cake […]
2013106 Things It was December 2010 that I spotted my first 106 in the wild, since then I have added another 219. Tomorrow is the deadline for final projects from my Spring 2013 UMW ds106 students. A few grades punched in the system later, and I close out my current era of teaching ds106. After being part […] New Takes Photo of Old cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Today’s ds106 daily create: "Take a picture of the oldest thing you own, and the newest thing you own" tdc.ds106.us/tdc480/ It might not be the oldest thing I own — I do have some pre-Cambrian granite– but this chess medal bears my grandather’s name "David Gottfried" and […]
2012The Sixty Million Dollar MOOC As a fan of Steve Austin I could not help myself in response to today’s news of edX. Hastily and sloppily edited in iMovie, oh well. “Higher education, learning. A concept barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s most massive online course. Edx […] Dear Photo: Birthday Dad cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Dear Photo, In the alternate path universes, today I am calling you in Florida to wish you a happy 85th Birthday. You will want more to hear me talk about me than me talk about you. I might be talking about the next trip down […]
2011Anti Tennis Radicalism cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Tennis is such a civilized activity. So proper, there is proper dress, clean white painted lines, rules to the game, it is all very genteel. It is the mark of an upstanding person, eh? Alas my overhead serve slamming friends, I must warn you that […]
2010Arizona State of Shame cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I’ve been in New York City a few days, a city who’s lively pulse is fed by the incredible density of people crammed on a small island, so many languages, so many shapes, colors, that you cannot even parse it all. It may not be all peace, love, […]
2007Breaking Up The Best of Show I just got self distracted, not in twittter, but twiddling here with the blog. For quite some time, I have rigged together a ‘Page’ in WordPress that uses a RSS feed with info on all the presentations I’ve done going back to 2003. This was generated by sending the feed to the Feed2JS site to […] Call This Site “CogDogTwitter” As promised, I went almost 24 hours without blogging about twitter. Today again, revealed some gems – a FireFox plugin that allows submitting tweets from the search bar; Rob documenting some real time action that were spawned by twitter exchanges… A bunch of colleagues plunged on board, full of their predictable twitter recidivism. Most people […] I Told Told You LinkedIn Was Creepy This notification creeps me out. Should I expect a manila brown envelope with incriminating photos? 😉 Be careful with your verbs on web sites. Share this barking on social media
2006The Elusive Right Mouse Click I’m doing occasional forays into Windows XP on my MacBookPro. A glaring omission, perhaps on my part, is figuring out how the heck to do those right mouse clicks needed to configure stuff. The control-click that works on the OS X side does not. I thought I might have to buy a 2 button mouse. […]

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

On Michael’s site he might use

There are 20 posts previously published on May 2nd

2025Dad*99 Oh the swirl of blog post ideas I have organized merely as swirls in my brain… will have to wait. My calendar reminded me that May 2 was the birthday of my Dad, Morris Lee Levine, born this day in Newark, New Jersey in 1928… WHAT A MINUTE. That’s a typo, because my human sometimes […] &amp#x27A1;
202498 on the Dad Scale Me and Dad were but 5 days apart on the birthday calendar, aand today, were he here, I’d be calling to tease and say, “How is 98 feel Dad?” There’d be that pause and a throaty left, with something like in reply, “Not bad at all, Junior.” I had a good round of memory sifting […] &amp#x27A1;
2023Dad@97 Happy day of birth “old man” aka Morris aka Mickey aka Dad… This would have been a cake with 97 candles flaming on it. I don’t have to ask ChatCPT to say anything about what it means to remember a loved one. But I did take a black and white (or is it sepia and […] &amp#x27A1;
2021From Snowberry to Dad, Leveling In May 2 is but one the 365 days per year, another block on the calendar, but also it is World Tuna Day. Who knew? Skip on by if you, rare reader, are looking for something difference for me recycling family memories. It’s my blog! This day for me is the marking of my Dad’s birthday, […] &amp#x27A1;
2020Young Dad May 2 marks Dad’s birthday, if he was here I would have called him to ask how it feels to be 94. There’s a challenge in trying to imagine your parents as kids. You come into the world, and there they are, fully formed. Dad was always just Dad, but there’s the few photos I […] &amp#x27A1; Olde Movie Tyme In pandemic times, out of the ordinary things happen. Around the home front last week, as a birthday thing, the family indulged me in watching a few favorite movies I watched repeatedly as a kid on TV in the early 1970s. Apparently my kid days was a long time ago. My movie and music tastes […] &amp#x27A1;
2019Every Open Tab a Curiosity Beckons I’ve mentioned it more than once here, but maybe the best thing I have done to put some serendipity wonder into the daily web browsing experience is installing the Library of Congress Free to Use extension. What it does is simple- each time I open a new tab in Chrome, rather than the white screen […] &amp#x27A1; Tools of Dad I do not need any social media reminder service to tell me who’s birthday is today; May 2 is always etched with being my Dad’s birthday. Today he would have been 93, but alas his odometer ran out at 72. I do this math, and figure out that when my dad was the age I […] &amp#x27A1;
2016Gitting, Forward Version Thinking, Presentations, Huh? This all started with looking at the WordPress site presentation deck Brian Lamb used for a talk last week at Conventry University. There’s a lot more to Brian’s talks than this, but few people title them as well as Ed Tech Isn’t Dead, It Just Smells Funny nor finds the wackiest GIFs. But I’m not […] &amp#x27A1;
2014The Blog Reader I Miss the Most creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Happy 86th Birthday, Dad, another one you missed. And how I miss you in this world. Actually the last one you had was your 75th. And we all knew it was the last. Because of that, I was there to watch him eat cake […] &amp#x27A1;
2013106 Things It was December 2010 that I spotted my first 106 in the wild, since then I have added another 219. Tomorrow is the deadline for final projects from my Spring 2013 UMW ds106 students. A few grades punched in the system later, and I close out my current era of teaching ds106. After being part […] &amp#x27A1; New Takes Photo of Old cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Today’s ds106 daily create: "Take a picture of the oldest thing you own, and the newest thing you own" tdc.ds106.us/tdc480/ It might not be the oldest thing I own — I do have some pre-Cambrian granite– but this chess medal bears my grandather’s name "David Gottfried" and […] &amp#x27A1;
2012The Sixty Million Dollar MOOC As a fan of Steve Austin I could not help myself in response to today’s news of edX. Hastily and sloppily edited in iMovie, oh well. “Higher education, learning. A concept barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s most massive online course. Edx […] &amp#x27A1; Dear Photo: Birthday Dad cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Dear Photo, In the alternate path universes, today I am calling you in Florida to wish you a happy 85th Birthday. You will want more to hear me talk about me than me talk about you. I might be talking about the next trip down […] &amp#x27A1;
2011Anti Tennis Radicalism cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Tennis is such a civilized activity. So proper, there is proper dress, clean white painted lines, rules to the game, it is all very genteel. It is the mark of an upstanding person, eh? Alas my overhead serve slamming friends, I must warn you that […] &amp#x27A1;
2010Arizona State of Shame cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I’ve been in New York City a few days, a city who’s lively pulse is fed by the incredible density of people crammed on a small island, so many languages, so many shapes, colors, that you cannot even parse it all. It may not be all peace, love, […] &amp#x27A1;
2007Breaking Up The Best of Show I just got self distracted, not in twittter, but twiddling here with the blog. For quite some time, I have rigged together a ‘Page’ in WordPress that uses a RSS feed with info on all the presentations I’ve done going back to 2003. This was generated by sending the feed to the Feed2JS site to […] &amp#x27A1; Call This Site “CogDogTwitter” As promised, I went almost 24 hours without blogging about twitter. Today again, revealed some gems – a FireFox plugin that allows submitting tweets from the search bar; Rob documenting some real time action that were spawned by twitter exchanges… A bunch of colleagues plunged on board, full of their predictable twitter recidivism. Most people […] &amp#x27A1; I Told Told You LinkedIn Was Creepy This notification creeps me out. Should I expect a manila brown envelope with incriminating photos? 😉 Be careful with your verbs on web sites. Share this barking on social media &amp#x27A1;
2006The Elusive Right Mouse Click I’m doing occasional forays into Windows XP on my MacBookPro. A glaring omission, perhaps on my part, is figuring out how the heck to do those right mouse clicks needed to configure stuff. The control-click that works on the OS X side does not. I thought I might have to buy a 2 button mouse. […] &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.