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 5 posts previously published on April 3rd

2025Got Three (months of daily photos) You know the old saying, right? March, in at 60 and out at 90? Huh? Days of the year! That’s right, I made it in this years Daily Photo Act of Obsession to get to 3 months with no strikes. In 2024 I got this far and daily-ed into mid April before it went POOF. […]
2020From Being There to You Don’t Have to Be Here to Care/Share Here’s a thirteen year arc or maybe a circle or maybe life is just a long looping GIF. One of the old slides says “Start with the #*@% Demo!” so here goes my video prepared as an “alt-format” presentation at the just wrapped OER20 conference. Do You Have to Be Here to Care/Share?Serendipitous connections including […]
2014Riders OF the Storm Here come the excuses and apologies (zoom). But when I saw Bryan’s tweet about the remix, I could not let it pass by This week in #IntroGuitar: Remixing Assignments talonsrockband.wordpress.com/2014/04/04/rem… cc' @cogdog @colinjagoe @phb256 @dkernohan @onepercentyello— Bryan Jackson (@bryanjack) April 04, 2014 I’m a long time Doors fan, so when I listened to ColinJagoe’s smooth […] DS106 Assignment Bank Theme: Now With Creative Commons Options cc licensed ( BY-NC-ND ) flickr photo shared by Mike_tn This is most likely the last feature I add to the WordPress DS106 Assignment Bank Theme. If you have been crawled under someone else’s blog, this is something I have been working on forever to generate a site like the ds106 Assignment Bank. In a […]
2013How #ds106 is #4life (and more, it’s an ethos) Two reminders from past UMW ds106 students. The ethos of ds106 carries on. First, a short email from Eric, who was in my Fall 2012 class: I was checking up on my final project videos and was amazed at how many views it has. I just thought you might think it was cool haha. Definitely […]

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

On Michael’s site he might use

There are 5 posts previously published on April 3rd

2025Got Three (months of daily photos) You know the old saying, right? March, in at 60 and out at 90? Huh? Days of the year! That’s right, I made it in this years Daily Photo Act of Obsession to get to 3 months with no strikes. In 2024 I got this far and daily-ed into mid April before it went POOF. […] &amp#x27A1;
2020From Being There to You Don’t Have to Be Here to Care/Share Here’s a thirteen year arc or maybe a circle or maybe life is just a long looping GIF. One of the old slides says “Start with the #*@% Demo!” so here goes my video prepared as an “alt-format” presentation at the just wrapped OER20 conference. Do You Have to Be Here to Care/Share?Serendipitous connections including […] &amp#x27A1;
2014Riders OF the Storm Here come the excuses and apologies (zoom). But when I saw Bryan’s tweet about the remix, I could not let it pass by This week in #IntroGuitar: Remixing Assignments talonsrockband.wordpress.com/2014/04/04/rem… cc' @cogdog @colinjagoe @phb256 @dkernohan @onepercentyello— Bryan Jackson (@bryanjack) April 04, 2014 I’m a long time Doors fan, so when I listened to ColinJagoe’s smooth […] &amp#x27A1; DS106 Assignment Bank Theme: Now With Creative Commons Options cc licensed ( BY-NC-ND ) flickr photo shared by Mike_tn This is most likely the last feature I add to the WordPress DS106 Assignment Bank Theme. If you have been crawled under someone else’s blog, this is something I have been working on forever to generate a site like the ds106 Assignment Bank. In a […] &amp#x27A1;
2013How #ds106 is #4life (and more, it’s an ethos) Two reminders from past UMW ds106 students. The ethos of ds106 carries on. First, a short email from Eric, who was in my Fall 2012 class: I was checking up on my final project videos and was amazed at how many views it has. I just thought you might think it was cool haha. Definitely […] &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.