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 11 posts previously published on December 26th

2021That Photo Thing, Again This moment is familiar. A series of thoughts having swirled around the brain space, whispering, there is something here to write about. The thoughts often lack a destination, so this is not writing with a planned plot, but one that may emerge. The other thoughts the first one keeps bumping into is the sense that […]
20202020 Zoomed By(e) Among the many unanticipated outcomes of 2020 is the genericizing of a product brand name into the vernacular (I have been waiting like 20 years to have a reason to use “vernacular” in a sentence). It’s like what happened when a translucent, colorless, flavorless food ingredient, commonly derived from collagen derived from the boiled bones, connective tissues […]
2019A Blocky Gutenburger Addition For Flickr CC Attribution Helper There’s something to be said for making your own tech tools; you certainly know quickly if something goes awry (though you cannot complain much about the tool provider). Something I made first almost 10 years ago is the flickr cc attribution helper. If you take on the task some think too arduous to give credit […]
2017Wagga Days at the spot along the Murrumbidgee Yikes, I am a month behind in blogging. I loathe back blogging. No one, of course really cares. Well I do. But the rest of my trip on Australia, the part following the part of the trip for the ISS Institute fellowship are needing this reflection. I could have zipped home after my two weeks, […]
2016That Old Fix The TV Trick You’ve likely come across the most common suggestion for fixing a computer problem. A related precedent is one I remember from the screens of my era- those old vacuum tube powered TVs. Quite often the way to fix a problem was not the restart, but a slap on the side. My little plastic one I […]
2012Cannonball Stage Line I am a sucker for road signs, and my rule is if it takes you more than a mile to question whether to turn around, you have gone too far. My first thought was the movie “Cannonball Run” and with the morning light at my back, thought it would work well with my truck in […] Won’t GIF Fooled Again What to GIF tonight? I was recalling a few photos I took of something in West Texas I spotted on my trip home in December. Then the lightning bolts flew, so thanks to Rowan Peter for the idea on my Who GIFs to include some Pete Townsend Windmill Powered GIFness I had a series of […]
2011Iconic [Animated] Moi Dog on a laptop. It’s time to warm up the ds106 assignment muscles, given that it is almost 2012, and things are already ramping up as evidenced by actual posts going on over at bavatuesdays. My plan is to comb through the assignments and find some that may have been lightly touched; but we are […]
2010The End of Extras as We Knew Them Modified from cc licensed flickr photo shared by One Thousand Words A few weeks ago I got a redemption code from Apple for a free move rental from iTunes– I chose to use it to watch Inception (I’m still resonating or reverberating with this movie, so this is not a review). It’s that “rental” in […]
2009Did Someone Change the Drapes? I’m slow to change some things…. I have had the same self modded theme on CogDogBlog since November 2005 (see the last face lift), so 4+ years later, I felt it was time to toy with some new digs. But I am impulsive (I can speed shop with the best of them), so I looked […]
2008Did Not Get that Music Toy you wanted for Xmas? Try JamStudio JamStudio is a nifty online music mixer where you can compose and publish your own tunes. You put music keys on the score, select instruments, set tempo, etc: You can create multiple “pages” of music; I just played quickly to create two “originals” (hah, just quick futzing around): Cowboy Glitter [448k MP3] Rain on the […]

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

On Michael’s site he might use

There are 11 posts previously published on December 26th

2021That Photo Thing, Again This moment is familiar. A series of thoughts having swirled around the brain space, whispering, there is something here to write about. The thoughts often lack a destination, so this is not writing with a planned plot, but one that may emerge. The other thoughts the first one keeps bumping into is the sense that […] &amp#x27A1;
20202020 Zoomed By(e) Among the many unanticipated outcomes of 2020 is the genericizing of a product brand name into the vernacular (I have been waiting like 20 years to have a reason to use “vernacular” in a sentence). It’s like what happened when a translucent, colorless, flavorless food ingredient, commonly derived from collagen derived from the boiled bones, connective tissues […] &amp#x27A1;
2019A Blocky Gutenburger Addition For Flickr CC Attribution Helper There’s something to be said for making your own tech tools; you certainly know quickly if something goes awry (though you cannot complain much about the tool provider). Something I made first almost 10 years ago is the flickr cc attribution helper. If you take on the task some think too arduous to give credit […] &amp#x27A1;
2017Wagga Days at the spot along the Murrumbidgee Yikes, I am a month behind in blogging. I loathe back blogging. No one, of course really cares. Well I do. But the rest of my trip on Australia, the part following the part of the trip for the ISS Institute fellowship are needing this reflection. I could have zipped home after my two weeks, […] &amp#x27A1;
2016That Old Fix The TV Trick You’ve likely come across the most common suggestion for fixing a computer problem. A related precedent is one I remember from the screens of my era- those old vacuum tube powered TVs. Quite often the way to fix a problem was not the restart, but a slap on the side. My little plastic one I […] &amp#x27A1;
2012Cannonball Stage Line I am a sucker for road signs, and my rule is if it takes you more than a mile to question whether to turn around, you have gone too far. My first thought was the movie “Cannonball Run” and with the morning light at my back, thought it would work well with my truck in […] &amp#x27A1; Won’t GIF Fooled Again What to GIF tonight? I was recalling a few photos I took of something in West Texas I spotted on my trip home in December. Then the lightning bolts flew, so thanks to Rowan Peter for the idea on my Who GIFs to include some Pete Townsend Windmill Powered GIFness I had a series of […] &amp#x27A1;
2011Iconic [Animated] Moi Dog on a laptop. It’s time to warm up the ds106 assignment muscles, given that it is almost 2012, and things are already ramping up as evidenced by actual posts going on over at bavatuesdays. My plan is to comb through the assignments and find some that may have been lightly touched; but we are […] &amp#x27A1;
2010The End of Extras as We Knew Them Modified from cc licensed flickr photo shared by One Thousand Words A few weeks ago I got a redemption code from Apple for a free move rental from iTunes– I chose to use it to watch Inception (I’m still resonating or reverberating with this movie, so this is not a review). It’s that “rental” in […] &amp#x27A1;
2009Did Someone Change the Drapes? I’m slow to change some things…. I have had the same self modded theme on CogDogBlog since November 2005 (see the last face lift), so 4+ years later, I felt it was time to toy with some new digs. But I am impulsive (I can speed shop with the best of them), so I looked […] &amp#x27A1;
2008Did Not Get that Music Toy you wanted for Xmas? Try JamStudio JamStudio is a nifty online music mixer where you can compose and publish your own tunes. You put music keys on the score, select instruments, set tempo, etc: You can create multiple “pages” of music; I just played quickly to create two “originals” (hah, just quick futzing around): Cowboy Glitter [448k MP3] Rain on the […] &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.