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 7 posts previously published on April 1st

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2014The Nag is On! Seeking (again) True Stories of Open Sharing Yes, I am doing this again. It’s been a whole year! On April 16 I am doing True Stories of Open Sharing for the eLearning Consortium of Colorado (eLCC) conference; it is their 25th one, they are just a month younger then the web itself. That’s pretty amazing. The web. I collect stories of its […]
2013The Cat’s Perspective: ds106 Charlie Chaplin Foley Remix What is going on here at CogDOGBlog, taking the side of the cat? But you see, the way I saw this video, the poor cat was just trying o sleep at that Lil Tramp kept messing him up: This is an example for my ds106 students of this week’s video assignment. Here’s the deal- in […] Turntable Booster cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Before I could listen to the old school turntable I got shipped by Jason in Vancouver (and it came to him via Grant Potter) I needed to get some audio equipment, namely an amp with phono inputs and some new speakers. Gardner Campbell gave me the ultimate […] At the Crossroads for Feed2JS cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Bert Werk Cut to the chase- unless something drops from the sky, the lights on my RSS feed service Feed2JS will turn off by June 1, 2013. Between now and then I will get the word out, attach a small alert on feeds fed, offering […]
2012Restoring a Dead Drop cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Last August when I was travleing across Canada, Giulia Forsythe and I went searching in Toronto for the location of the one dead drop located there. Dead drops are in many ways akin to the Piratebox, publicly placed peer to peer file sharing approaches using […] A StoryBox Intercom (ideas wanted) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by alexkerhead I’m toying with a new idea for a public interaction device with the StoryBox/Piratebox but the DIY part is something I could use suggestions on. The idea is to have a device out in a public space, that is within range of the wireless network […]

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

On Michael’s site he might use

There are 7 posts previously published on April 1st

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2014The Nag is On! Seeking (again) True Stories of Open Sharing Yes, I am doing this again. It’s been a whole year! On April 16 I am doing True Stories of Open Sharing for the eLearning Consortium of Colorado (eLCC) conference; it is their 25th one, they are just a month younger then the web itself. That’s pretty amazing. The web. I collect stories of its […] &amp#x27A1;
2013The Cat’s Perspective: ds106 Charlie Chaplin Foley Remix What is going on here at CogDOGBlog, taking the side of the cat? But you see, the way I saw this video, the poor cat was just trying o sleep at that Lil Tramp kept messing him up: This is an example for my ds106 students of this week’s video assignment. Here’s the deal- in […] &amp#x27A1; Turntable Booster cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Before I could listen to the old school turntable I got shipped by Jason in Vancouver (and it came to him via Grant Potter) I needed to get some audio equipment, namely an amp with phono inputs and some new speakers. Gardner Campbell gave me the ultimate […] &amp#x27A1; At the Crossroads for Feed2JS cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Bert Werk Cut to the chase- unless something drops from the sky, the lights on my RSS feed service Feed2JS will turn off by June 1, 2013. Between now and then I will get the word out, attach a small alert on feeds fed, offering […] &amp#x27A1;
2012Restoring a Dead Drop cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Last August when I was travleing across Canada, Giulia Forsythe and I went searching in Toronto for the location of the one dead drop located there. Dead drops are in many ways akin to the Piratebox, publicly placed peer to peer file sharing approaches using […] &amp#x27A1; A StoryBox Intercom (ideas wanted) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by alexkerhead I’m toying with a new idea for a public interaction device with the StoryBox/Piratebox but the DIY part is something I could use suggestions on. The idea is to have a device out in a public space, that is within range of the wireless network […] &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.