“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 17 posts previously published on July 24th
- 2025
- Writing HTML, Writing the Web, Righting the Web Come sit around the campfire for more old web person stories. As it was when I landed on the web in 1993, I am always thinking about the making, the literal weaving as the master wrote, of the web. And how underneath it all, nearly always visible, if you can look, is a bunch of […]
- 2019
- Lunar Optimism It’s a bit past the apogee (see what I did there?) of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar mission. Maybe a long time for us, but to the moon, that’s but 0.000000011 of its history. The Eagle landed, and it was 2:56 UTC on July 21 when Neil Armstrong stepped out of the […]
- 2016
- A Dog and I 30 Years Ago While I revel in the joy of life changed with the introduction of my newish dog Felix, my calendar bittersweetly reminds me today is the day 23 years ago I put down my first dog, Dominoe. She too was adopted, though not via a shelter, but via co-workers of my friend and them apartment-mate, Kevin, […]
- Two #DigPed #Vconnecting Sessions in 19 Hours: aka Waking up in the Middle of the Night to Connect Less than a year ago I explained why I would wake up at 4AM for a Virtually Connecting session at ALT-C, the same reason applied in July 2016 for a session I hosted, one of several from the Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute PEI. It’s because of special people I know there and plus new special […]
- 2015
- Two Weeks of #UdGAgora in Photos It’s impossible to summarize. And likely will not fully happen. Today is the last day of two weeks of the most intensive and the most rewarding work with faculty and technology, in a city I continually use my stunted Spanish to say “Me encanta Guadalajara.” So intense the blog posts have not happened. But to […]
- 2014
- Feed WordPress 101: Some Feed Magic This is part 4 of 5 in a series of posts for Building Connected Courses: Feed WordPress 101 Basic Concepts of Syndication – and what to think about even before you touch that WordPress thing Installing and Setting up Feed WordPress – Minimal settings, and planning the way content is sliced, diced, and recombined Feeding […]
- 2011
- Dominoe 1993 July 24 is a bitter sweet memory here at the Dog House, that being the day in 1993 that I made the dreadful decision to put Dominoe to sleep, the faithful dog who traveled cross country with me form Baltimore to Phoenix, who tagged along on my excursions up and down the west, and whose […]
- 2010
- Dominoe’s Day cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Today (July 24) is my day to honor my first and most special dog, Dominoe, who left this world in 1993. Is it really 17 years? That’s a full generation. And it was long after that that I told her story like 50 million times. cc licensed flickr […]
- 2009
- Hey CoolIris- I Got yer Bug Right Here cc licensed flickr photo shared by [phil h] I’m a huge fan of CoolIris, the browser plugin that turns media content into an amazing flowing virtual wall. It is hands down one of the best ways to explore flickr or YouTube searches, since results are not limited to one page, it becomes endless flow. cc […]
- 2009/365/2005 Remembering Dominoe cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Today was the sad, sad day in 1993 when Dominoe had to be put down. Since she was the big star of my
- 2008
- Finally A Meaningful Use For Excel: GraphJam OMG, my sides are aching from laughter, just me and my web browser and the GraphJam site which is taglined “Pop cullture for people in cubicles”. People submit Excel generated charts and graphs that illustrate sayings, song topics, or just relationships of things from history or modern life (Found this in the latest issue of […]
- iBlog Awesome is the new WordPress app for blogging from an iDevice. Writing from iPod Touch on my home wireless. “If I only had a phone…” Note: Republishing in web as TwitterTools did not relay this post sent from iPod Share this barking on social media
- 2007
- Slideshare, now Slidecasts, with Sound! I’ve been fond of Slideshare for months, and have been meeting to blog about how they’ve quielty rolled in social networking features, but their newly announced feature today of providing the ability to upload and synchronize sound to slides is the proclaimed Killer App Kick All the Others in the Butt. What they have done […]
- 2006
- Blog Funk Not that it matters on any cosmic scale, but for what it’s likely not worth, a blog funk has settled slowly in ’round here. I’m up to my ears in various web dabblings, way behind in checking out cool new stuff from elsewhere and others, still waiting for may MacBookPro to be fixed, still waiting […]
- 2005
- Ico-ifiyng Your Blog Creating a web browser icon for your blog or web site is hardly mission critical, but in case anyone out there is looking for the easy way to do this, especially the WordPress crowd, here is how I did it with minimal fuss. The typical method involves creating a facivon.ico image file and placing that […]
- Skipping the Big Edu Cons I am not trying to start a boycott, but am making my own pointless statement about my fatigue with the format and limited outcomes of attending the large educational technology conferences. I’ve barked and moaned previously (see “I’m Bored As Hell And I’m Not Gonna… zzzzz”) about the staleness and sad irony of the 50 […]
- 2003
- Show Your Love for RSS By way of Dave Winer (by way of NetNewsWire on my desktop) come these nifty graphic badge icons from Bryan Bell. Get yours today in delicious pink, blue, green, as PNG or GIF files, nicely provided to match your site. Yummy candy. Show your love. Fortunately, they are NOT imprinted with “I love RSS 0.91” […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 17 posts previously published on July 24th
- 2025
- Writing HTML, Writing the Web, Righting the Web Come sit around the campfire for more old web person stories. As it was when I landed on the web in 1993, I am always thinking about the making, the literal weaving as the master wrote, of the web. And how underneath it all, nearly always visible, if you can look, is a bunch of […] ➡
- 2019
- Lunar Optimism It’s a bit past the apogee (see what I did there?) of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar mission. Maybe a long time for us, but to the moon, that’s but 0.000000011 of its history. The Eagle landed, and it was 2:56 UTC on July 21 when Neil Armstrong stepped out of the […] ➡
- 2016
- A Dog and I 30 Years Ago While I revel in the joy of life changed with the introduction of my newish dog Felix, my calendar bittersweetly reminds me today is the day 23 years ago I put down my first dog, Dominoe. She too was adopted, though not via a shelter, but via co-workers of my friend and them apartment-mate, Kevin, […] ➡
- Two #DigPed #Vconnecting Sessions in 19 Hours: aka Waking up in the Middle of the Night to Connect Less than a year ago I explained why I would wake up at 4AM for a Virtually Connecting session at ALT-C, the same reason applied in July 2016 for a session I hosted, one of several from the Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute PEI. It’s because of special people I know there and plus new special […] ➡
- 2015
- Two Weeks of #UdGAgora in Photos It’s impossible to summarize. And likely will not fully happen. Today is the last day of two weeks of the most intensive and the most rewarding work with faculty and technology, in a city I continually use my stunted Spanish to say “Me encanta Guadalajara.” So intense the blog posts have not happened. But to […] ➡
- 2014
- Feed WordPress 101: Some Feed Magic This is part 4 of 5 in a series of posts for Building Connected Courses: Feed WordPress 101 Basic Concepts of Syndication – and what to think about even before you touch that WordPress thing Installing and Setting up Feed WordPress – Minimal settings, and planning the way content is sliced, diced, and recombined Feeding […] ➡
- 2011
- Dominoe 1993 July 24 is a bitter sweet memory here at the Dog House, that being the day in 1993 that I made the dreadful decision to put Dominoe to sleep, the faithful dog who traveled cross country with me form Baltimore to Phoenix, who tagged along on my excursions up and down the west, and whose […] ➡
- 2010
- Dominoe’s Day cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Today (July 24) is my day to honor my first and most special dog, Dominoe, who left this world in 1993. Is it really 17 years? That’s a full generation. And it was long after that that I told her story like 50 million times. cc licensed flickr […] ➡
- 2009
- Hey CoolIris- I Got yer Bug Right Here cc licensed flickr photo shared by [phil h] I’m a huge fan of CoolIris, the browser plugin that turns media content into an amazing flowing virtual wall. It is hands down one of the best ways to explore flickr or YouTube searches, since results are not limited to one page, it becomes endless flow. cc […] ➡
- 2009/365/2005 Remembering Dominoe cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Today was the sad, sad day in 1993 when Dominoe had to be put down. Since she was the big star of my ➡
- 2008
- Finally A Meaningful Use For Excel: GraphJam OMG, my sides are aching from laughter, just me and my web browser and the GraphJam site which is taglined “Pop cullture for people in cubicles”. People submit Excel generated charts and graphs that illustrate sayings, song topics, or just relationships of things from history or modern life (Found this in the latest issue of […] ➡
- iBlog Awesome is the new WordPress app for blogging from an iDevice. Writing from iPod Touch on my home wireless. “If I only had a phone…” Note: Republishing in web as TwitterTools did not relay this post sent from iPod Share this barking on social media ➡
- 2007
- Slideshare, now Slidecasts, with Sound! I’ve been fond of Slideshare for months, and have been meeting to blog about how they’ve quielty rolled in social networking features, but their newly announced feature today of providing the ability to upload and synchronize sound to slides is the proclaimed Killer App Kick All the Others in the Butt. What they have done […] ➡
- 2006
- Blog Funk Not that it matters on any cosmic scale, but for what it’s likely not worth, a blog funk has settled slowly in ’round here. I’m up to my ears in various web dabblings, way behind in checking out cool new stuff from elsewhere and others, still waiting for may MacBookPro to be fixed, still waiting […] ➡
- 2005
- Ico-ifiyng Your Blog Creating a web browser icon for your blog or web site is hardly mission critical, but in case anyone out there is looking for the easy way to do this, especially the WordPress crowd, here is how I did it with minimal fuss. The typical method involves creating a facivon.ico image file and placing that […] ➡
- Skipping the Big Edu Cons I am not trying to start a boycott, but am making my own pointless statement about my fatigue with the format and limited outcomes of attending the large educational technology conferences. I’ve barked and moaned previously (see “I’m Bored As Hell And I’m Not Gonna… zzzzz”) about the staleness and sad irony of the 50 […] ➡
- 2003
- Show Your Love for RSS By way of Dave Winer (by way of NetNewsWire on my desktop) come these nifty graphic badge icons from Bryan Bell. Get yours today in delicious pink, blue, green, as PNG or GIF files, nicely provided to match your site. Yummy candy. Show your love. Fortunately, they are NOT imprinted with “I love RSS 0.91” […] ➡
// 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.
