“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 14 posts previously published on September 2nd
- 2025
- Let’s Go Wild With #DS106 Hey! It’s a placeholder post! This is in prep for a session in the planning for the Reclaim Open Conference 2025 wiith some theme about rewilding. I am in cahoots with a confabulating group of DS106 veterans and we are going to get y’all rewilding via the DS106 Daily Create. Can you handle the Daily […]
- 2019
- Bot the Author Meet the AI storyteller? I could not resist the try of StoryAI after seeing this mention from Zach Whalen. After nothing the first results were “conventional”, Zach gave it a good test to see how much I was in the AI. I was as curious, but not maybe as clever. For a prompt I was […]
- 2015
- Introducing the (new) #ds106 Daily Create Today marks the 1333th DS106 Daily Create— it has not missed a beat since TDC1 on January 8, 2012. There will be one tomorrow, and the day after that, and the… … with subtle switch coming up officially Thursday. We are switching it to a new site that continues the practice but changes, and hopefully […]
- The Implementation Plan Scene from “Dilo Space” It is only for solemn or silly reasons I will put a cloth chain around my neck. Yesterday was definitely the latter. I made a video as a “trailer” for our upcoming UdG Agora Google Hangout (this Friday) the live sessions we are running each week to support the online phase of the project. Of […]
- 2014
- A Trip Through Sametown I made this video today while driving through Monstrose CO using the new Hyperlapse app (music added in Youtube)- it is a sped up and somewhat smooth, frenetic trip through that kind of traffic light choked franchise encased commercial strip that exist not only across the US, but elsewhere in the world. This is Main […]
- 2013
- Marvin’s Journey Home cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine It’s been a while since I have seen Marvin. He was excited to travel with me on my big trip in 2011, it was his idea to jump out at every stop to get a photo. He was reliable for a few photos, […]
- We are the link that circles back on itself cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine They come unexpectedly, unscheduled, unobtrusively. An email from a stranger. A comment on a blog that is shockingly written by a person, not some shoe selling bot. And yesterday, a comment on the flickr photo above. It’s obviously a screenshot, but I had […]
- 2012
- Aunt Dorothy cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It’s been a really long long long time since I can even remember spending time with my Aunt Dorothy. She is my Mom’s younger sister; she lent so much to the meeting we had a year ago with the presiding rabbit (oops it was not […]
- Every Box You Type in Can be a Doorway to Creativity cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by demandaj One pattern I see repeated in the patterns of new bloggers (and this is aimed at my new batch of ds106 students is that they typically write posts with really general or lackluster titles. “Assignment 1” “My Introduction” “Week 1” “Daily Create #345”. […]
- 2009
- The Tragedy of Wired cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog The cover story of the current issue of Wired must be the weakest, molecule wafer thin piece they ever published. Were the editors all on vacation and they left the magazine to some middle school kids to write? The tragedy of craigslist is that their web design is […]
- The New MTV is Where M is Me I have not even seen a glimpse of MTV for at least 10 or 15 years. I am so old I can remember when the “M” stood for “Music”: I can remember the riveting teen age moment when MTV first launched- it was radical, different, spoke to me– and it felt at the time like […]
- 2005
- Two Platefuls: Online Calendar and Event Database flickr fotoBrunchavailable on adrian’s flickr Turnovers, fruit, muffins, eggs. Juice.(Another fine free image from the flickr Creative Commons By Attribution collection. So for the first installment here on what’s been on my plate project-wise, we are grabbing a couple of related items that support dynamic calendar information for our site and registration for events. The […]
- 2004
- Take A New Survey Tool For a Test Drive In the last two years, we have home spun 4 or 5 online surveys for our projects. It took a bit of elbow grease in PHP and mySQL to get a decent system, and we were successful in creating a usable form for our survey-ees and a reporting tool. But this year, the demand was […]
- Checking Back On Bloggdigger A few clicks back I had played with a test Blogdigger collection – this is a service that allows you to take a pile of web/RSS feeds, and then have that itself be able to collapse into its own feed- an uber feed if you will. My test was to build up a collection of […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 14 posts previously published on September 2nd
- 2025
- Let’s Go Wild With #DS106 Hey! It’s a placeholder post! This is in prep for a session in the planning for the Reclaim Open Conference 2025 wiith some theme about rewilding. I am in cahoots with a confabulating group of DS106 veterans and we are going to get y’all rewilding via the DS106 Daily Create. Can you handle the Daily […] ➡
- 2019
- Bot the Author Meet the AI storyteller? I could not resist the try of StoryAI after seeing this mention from Zach Whalen. After nothing the first results were “conventional”, Zach gave it a good test to see how much I was in the AI. I was as curious, but not maybe as clever. For a prompt I was […] ➡
- 2015
- Introducing the (new) #ds106 Daily Create Today marks the 1333th DS106 Daily Create— it has not missed a beat since TDC1 on January 8, 2012. There will be one tomorrow, and the day after that, and the… … with subtle switch coming up officially Thursday. We are switching it to a new site that continues the practice but changes, and hopefully […] ➡
- The Implementation Plan Scene from “Dilo Space” It is only for solemn or silly reasons I will put a cloth chain around my neck. Yesterday was definitely the latter. I made a video as a “trailer” for our upcoming UdG Agora Google Hangout (this Friday) the live sessions we are running each week to support the online phase of the project. Of […] ➡
- 2014
- A Trip Through Sametown I made this video today while driving through Monstrose CO using the new Hyperlapse app (music added in Youtube)- it is a sped up and somewhat smooth, frenetic trip through that kind of traffic light choked franchise encased commercial strip that exist not only across the US, but elsewhere in the world. This is Main […] ➡
- 2013
- Marvin’s Journey Home cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine It’s been a while since I have seen Marvin. He was excited to travel with me on my big trip in 2011, it was his idea to jump out at every stop to get a photo. He was reliable for a few photos, […] ➡
- We are the link that circles back on itself cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine They come unexpectedly, unscheduled, unobtrusively. An email from a stranger. A comment on a blog that is shockingly written by a person, not some shoe selling bot. And yesterday, a comment on the flickr photo above. It’s obviously a screenshot, but I had […] ➡
- 2012
- Aunt Dorothy cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It’s been a really long long long time since I can even remember spending time with my Aunt Dorothy. She is my Mom’s younger sister; she lent so much to the meeting we had a year ago with the presiding rabbit (oops it was not […] ➡
- Every Box You Type in Can be a Doorway to Creativity cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by demandaj One pattern I see repeated in the patterns of new bloggers (and this is aimed at my new batch of ds106 students is that they typically write posts with really general or lackluster titles. “Assignment 1” “My Introduction” “Week 1” “Daily Create #345”. […] ➡
- 2009
- The Tragedy of Wired cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog The cover story of the current issue of Wired must be the weakest, molecule wafer thin piece they ever published. Were the editors all on vacation and they left the magazine to some middle school kids to write? The tragedy of craigslist is that their web design is […] ➡
- The New MTV is Where M is Me I have not even seen a glimpse of MTV for at least 10 or 15 years. I am so old I can remember when the “M” stood for “Music”: I can remember the riveting teen age moment when MTV first launched- it was radical, different, spoke to me– and it felt at the time like […] ➡
- 2005
- Two Platefuls: Online Calendar and Event Database flickr fotoBrunchavailable on adrian’s flickr Turnovers, fruit, muffins, eggs. Juice.(Another fine free image from the flickr Creative Commons By Attribution collection. So for the first installment here on what’s been on my plate project-wise, we are grabbing a couple of related items that support dynamic calendar information for our site and registration for events. The […] ➡
- 2004
- Take A New Survey Tool For a Test Drive In the last two years, we have home spun 4 or 5 online surveys for our projects. It took a bit of elbow grease in PHP and mySQL to get a decent system, and we were successful in creating a usable form for our survey-ees and a reporting tool. But this year, the demand was […] ➡
- Checking Back On Bloggdigger A few clicks back I had played with a test Blogdigger collection – this is a service that allows you to take a pile of web/RSS feeds, and then have that itself be able to collapse into its own feed- an uber feed if you will. My test was to build up a collection of […] ➡
// 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.
Share this barking on social media
