“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
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.
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.
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 10 posts previously published on March 12th
- 2025
- The Mystical Way of Links Links, links, links. Happy [Link Loving] Web Day, being the 36th birthday of the World Wide Web, as it needed to be named at that time. As a well established adult at that age, you are confiden— okay enough web anthropomorphizing. One of those things I tag as webserendipity happened a few days ago, and […]
- 2021
- Aunt Ruth at 100- No Today Show Jam but (shrug) Army Footlocker The calendar reminder was on time today as was my sister Judy with a text messaging noting that today was our Aunt Ruth’s 100th birthday. My Mom’s oldest sister, Ruth has outlived siblings Dinah, Harvey, and Alyce (mom) while Dorothy, the youngest is living too. Judy has heard via Facebook that Ruth’s granddaughter had entered […]
- 2018
- The [WordPress] Wall For a UDG Mural Mexico has much to teach the American president about the uses for walls; they are not for barriers, but a surface for mural art. I was charged with putting together a web site for the project I was part of last week in Mexico. While it was a followup to the UDG Agora (the participants […]
- Nos Gusta Mucho Guadalajara This blog may not be big enough to fully describe last week’s experience being part of the UDG Mural project in Guadalajara, you really had to be there. Beyond working with the best team, supported by a fantastic group of planners, backed by a big leagued sized educational institution you never hear about, and invited […]
- 2016
- From Wonder Woman to the Bayeux Tapestry: Hypertext Without Hyperlinks Last month I managed to clean off two partly read books, now I am moving on to a book I really have enjoyed, but has been sitting, partly read, on my coffee table, Jill Lepore’s Secret History of Wonder Woman I got the book last June, when I was getting ready for a project visit […]
- 2014
- 2013
- Sleepy Dog Blog cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Marcelo Tourne This is just a pulse on the blog o meter to let someone know I’m still out and about, now in Singapore. As usual, I have completely underestimated the toll of travel and lining up a lot of sessions. The pile of back […]
- 2012
- Culture of Openness Panel (SXSWedu) Instagram photo by David Wiley. I can only guess David would license it under creative commons as Instagram seems not to care. From the back blog department, audio recording and notes from a panel discussion I participated on at SXSWedu, Developing a Culture of Openness where I appeared with Jim Groom, Karen Fasimpaur, and Philipp […]
- 2006
- They Sell Blog Spam Software, Don’t They? Dress it up with ad talk like “Dominate Any Market”, but to me Super Blog Submitter Pro is nothing short of spammers delight. Is this a virtuous, noble, make your Mom proud, business or what: The VooDooBlogger software is amazing in every respect! … Imagine creating entire blog farms in a matter of hours instead […]
- 2004
- Captain Biff, Flies the MLX Lead Balloon, Powered By A Breeze The New Media Consortium Spring 2004 Online Conference was come and gone this week. I am still favorable of the format, and its mix of streaming presentations, asynchronous discussions, and live chat sessions- most online conferences throw so many sessions and event son the pile that you get overloaded. The NMC ones have had a […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 10 posts previously published on March 12th
- 2025
- The Mystical Way of Links Links, links, links. Happy [Link Loving] Web Day, being the 36th birthday of the World Wide Web, as it needed to be named at that time. As a well established adult at that age, you are confiden— okay enough web anthropomorphizing. One of those things I tag as webserendipity happened a few days ago, and […] ➡
- 2021
- Aunt Ruth at 100- No Today Show Jam but (shrug) Army Footlocker The calendar reminder was on time today as was my sister Judy with a text messaging noting that today was our Aunt Ruth’s 100th birthday. My Mom’s oldest sister, Ruth has outlived siblings Dinah, Harvey, and Alyce (mom) while Dorothy, the youngest is living too. Judy has heard via Facebook that Ruth’s granddaughter had entered […] ➡
- 2018
- The [WordPress] Wall For a UDG Mural Mexico has much to teach the American president about the uses for walls; they are not for barriers, but a surface for mural art. I was charged with putting together a web site for the project I was part of last week in Mexico. While it was a followup to the UDG Agora (the participants […] ➡
- Nos Gusta Mucho Guadalajara This blog may not be big enough to fully describe last week’s experience being part of the UDG Mural project in Guadalajara, you really had to be there. Beyond working with the best team, supported by a fantastic group of planners, backed by a big leagued sized educational institution you never hear about, and invited […] ➡
- 2016
- 2014
- 2013
- Sleepy Dog Blog cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Marcelo Tourne This is just a pulse on the blog o meter to let someone know I’m still out and about, now in Singapore. As usual, I have completely underestimated the toll of travel and lining up a lot of sessions. The pile of back […] ➡
- 2012
- Culture of Openness Panel (SXSWedu) Instagram photo by David Wiley. I can only guess David would license it under creative commons as Instagram seems not to care. From the back blog department, audio recording and notes from a panel discussion I participated on at SXSWedu, Developing a Culture of Openness where I appeared with Jim Groom, Karen Fasimpaur, and Philipp […] ➡
- 2006
- They Sell Blog Spam Software, Don’t They? Dress it up with ad talk like “Dominate Any Market”, but to me Super Blog Submitter Pro is nothing short of spammers delight. Is this a virtuous, noble, make your Mom proud, business or what: The VooDooBlogger software is amazing in every respect! … Imagine creating entire blog farms in a matter of hours instead […] ➡
- 2004
- Captain Biff, Flies the MLX Lead Balloon, Powered By A Breeze The New Media Consortium Spring 2004 Online Conference was come and gone this week. I am still favorable of the format, and its mix of streaming presentations, asynchronous discussions, and live chat sessions- most online conferences throw so many sessions and event son the pile that you get overloaded. The NMC ones have had a […] ➡
// 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.
