“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 18 posts previously published on September 9th
- 2025
- Forming Names, Globally How many online forms do you think you have filled out in your web life? Likely if you live on the continent I am in, there is no thought needed when you see boxes for First Name, Last Name, etc, right? It’s standard practice, move on. Over the last few years creating them for my […]
- A[I]s We May Not Think (nor search, nor link) Somewhere in recent web travels I read someone’s post who had just discovered the insight and inspiration of Vannevar Bush’s seminal 1945 essay published in the Atlantic in 1945 As We May Think (linking to the open ACM version as sadly the original one from the Atlantic is stuffed behind their foul paywall). I have […]
- 2024
- Got Explored! Woah, two blog posts two days in a row? That has not happened since, like… 1942 (that’s a joke for Cori and I). The blog is not dead! But indeed, I got some of the nice, chest thumping “chuffed” feeling (as my friends on the other pond side say), for a recent flickr photo I […]
- 2019
- Now With Post Publishing Mods: TRU Collector SPLOT My data suggests the world is definitely post-SPLOT, it’s fallen to the bowels of the hype curve? I am almost ready to offer bribes to what I thought was a major accomplishment, blogged here a month ago. But the SPLOTs go on in development right here. I have as of this morning a working prototype […]
- 2015
- Should He Teach or Should He Go / Leaving Wisconsin I had to do this, I tweeted myself out on a limb. First there was the wildly epic good news maybe yesterday that Jesse Stommel was going to take on the role of leading DTLT at the University of Mary Washington, but as pointed out in a tweet by Rolin Moe, there’s a lot to […]
- 2014
- Seeking Syndicated / Distributed / Connected Course Examples creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Maybe it’s the ramp up of Connected Courses but it’s also some upcoming presentations that made my slap my had with a loud “DOH”. I want to create a collection of examples of (and here is where I mumble because I do not know […]
- Unpawning Flickr Notes creative commons licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by StockMonkeys.com Hey! Stand up, code up, hack up! Just because [fill in the blank of your favorite web service that yanked the chain on a feature you adored] took away a feature, you are not powerless. One of my long running favorite flickr features was […]
- 2013
- Have You Been Daily Creative in Week 2? Already a day late, and much more than a dollar short. I am resisting the apology tone for ds106 week (NO APOLOGIES IN DS106!, NO APOLOGIES IN DS106!). My attention went elsewhere, but if I did anything this week (I think) were some daily creates. Actually I do not remember, I end up paging through […]
- 2011
- More Alan Artifacts cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog That is Alan 1.0 as in 1.0 years old. I’ve had a bittersweet time revisiting the boxes and carefully organized albums, envelopes of stuff Mom had hung on to. Here I think I am some hot shit for collecting media, and Mom has been doing […]
- The ds106radio Bar Mitzvahcast cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This cassette tape came zooming out of the past, right from 1976, to me at my sister’s house– she had found it this past summer while cleaning up at my Mom’s house. Yep, on these slender piece of ribbon, 35 years old of magnetized particles, […]
- 2010
- Theory, Practice, and Stubs I fell into a link hole. It seems almost more interesting to me when Google does not reveal answers, but offers more riddles. Where is the truth? Out there. Or in there. I saw this rather provocative and clever quote in… of all places, the first issue of Hacker Monthly. That I came by the […]
- 2008
- Give and the Nets Giveth Back Oh yeah, it does pay to give stuff away! Or at least to put half baked ideas “out there”. After just posting late last night about my crude 5 card flickr story demo I lamented the problems in code I had in easily getting random flickr photos from a given tag, John Krutsch emailed and […]
- 2007
- The Web 2.0 Laundry List is Us/ing Me I am in the one month scramble the jets mode to get ready for my Australian tour where I hope to avoid any street protesters nor tangle up anyone’s traffic with my motorcade. I had put some thought around how to do a Web 2.0 workshop that is not the typical ed-tech geek approach of […]
- 2005
- iBook Meltdown While editing some images in PhotoShop this morning, my home iBook (2002 vintage) went belly-up; the screen went to vertical bars and all attempts to restart produced no startup screen, no spinning of the drive. Realizing it is likely a significant hardware failure, I checked my AppleCare warranty and saw I had only 7 more […]
- 2004
- Blogdigger in Action at UBC More fun for Greg at Blogdigger 😉 My colleague Brian Lamb shared some nifty web resources for a class he is teaching at University of British Columbia. Remember, Rip-Mix-Burn… Specifically, he has created (rip) a Bloggdigger Group (a collection of chosen RSS feeds), that is itself turned into an RSS feed (mix), and is embedded […]
- The Sheer Ecstasy of Feedback From Afar Yesterday I was listening to a Electronic Portfolios Virtual Community of Practice chat session that swam around on the issues of “Digital Natives vs Digital Immigrants” and motivators for students to engage in eport activity. On reflection, I think the group under estimates the sheer power of having a personal publishing platform, especially if there […]
- 2003
- Stupid Practice in Email Virus Protection Systems: Stop Spamming the Innocent This dog is angry. Spam is a reality, some 40% of email traffic. But there is absolutely no reason for the email scanning systems put in place to be sending reject emails back to accounts when the viruses generating them are spoofing (forging) the emails. I cannot be the only person wasting work time deleting […]
- RSS feeds from my.OAI Dynamic RSS feeds are available now from searches performed at my.OAI, the tool for digging through a series of idatabases available as Open Archives. my.OAI is a full-featured search engine to a selected list of metadata databases from the Open Archives Initiative project. All searches performed at my.OAI, even is guest mode are returned with […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 18 posts previously published on September 9th
- 2025
- Forming Names, Globally How many online forms do you think you have filled out in your web life? Likely if you live on the continent I am in, there is no thought needed when you see boxes for First Name, Last Name, etc, right? It’s standard practice, move on. Over the last few years creating them for my […] ➡
- A[I]s We May Not Think (nor search, nor link) Somewhere in recent web travels I read someone’s post who had just discovered the insight and inspiration of Vannevar Bush’s seminal 1945 essay published in the Atlantic in 1945 As We May Think (linking to the open ACM version as sadly the original one from the Atlantic is stuffed behind their foul paywall). I have […] ➡
- 2024
- Got Explored! Woah, two blog posts two days in a row? That has not happened since, like… 1942 (that’s a joke for Cori and I). The blog is not dead! But indeed, I got some of the nice, chest thumping “chuffed” feeling (as my friends on the other pond side say), for a recent flickr photo I […] ➡
- 2019
- Now With Post Publishing Mods: TRU Collector SPLOT My data suggests the world is definitely post-SPLOT, it’s fallen to the bowels of the hype curve? I am almost ready to offer bribes to what I thought was a major accomplishment, blogged here a month ago. But the SPLOTs go on in development right here. I have as of this morning a working prototype […] ➡
- 2015
- Should He Teach or Should He Go / Leaving Wisconsin I had to do this, I tweeted myself out on a limb. First there was the wildly epic good news maybe yesterday that Jesse Stommel was going to take on the role of leading DTLT at the University of Mary Washington, but as pointed out in a tweet by Rolin Moe, there’s a lot to […] ➡
- 2014
- Seeking Syndicated / Distributed / Connected Course Examples creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Maybe it’s the ramp up of Connected Courses but it’s also some upcoming presentations that made my slap my had with a loud “DOH”. I want to create a collection of examples of (and here is where I mumble because I do not know […] ➡
- Unpawning Flickr Notes creative commons licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by StockMonkeys.com Hey! Stand up, code up, hack up! Just because [fill in the blank of your favorite web service that yanked the chain on a feature you adored] took away a feature, you are not powerless. One of my long running favorite flickr features was […] ➡
- 2013
- Have You Been Daily Creative in Week 2? Already a day late, and much more than a dollar short. I am resisting the apology tone for ds106 week (NO APOLOGIES IN DS106!, NO APOLOGIES IN DS106!). My attention went elsewhere, but if I did anything this week (I think) were some daily creates. Actually I do not remember, I end up paging through […] ➡
- 2011
- More Alan Artifacts cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog That is Alan 1.0 as in 1.0 years old. I’ve had a bittersweet time revisiting the boxes and carefully organized albums, envelopes of stuff Mom had hung on to. Here I think I am some hot shit for collecting media, and Mom has been doing […] ➡
- The ds106radio Bar Mitzvahcast cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This cassette tape came zooming out of the past, right from 1976, to me at my sister’s house– she had found it this past summer while cleaning up at my Mom’s house. Yep, on these slender piece of ribbon, 35 years old of magnetized particles, […] ➡
- 2010
- Theory, Practice, and Stubs I fell into a link hole. It seems almost more interesting to me when Google does not reveal answers, but offers more riddles. Where is the truth? Out there. Or in there. I saw this rather provocative and clever quote in… of all places, the first issue of Hacker Monthly. That I came by the […] ➡
- 2008
- Give and the Nets Giveth Back Oh yeah, it does pay to give stuff away! Or at least to put half baked ideas “out there”. After just posting late last night about my crude 5 card flickr story demo I lamented the problems in code I had in easily getting random flickr photos from a given tag, John Krutsch emailed and […] ➡
- 2007
- The Web 2.0 Laundry List is Us/ing Me I am in the one month scramble the jets mode to get ready for my Australian tour where I hope to avoid any street protesters nor tangle up anyone’s traffic with my motorcade. I had put some thought around how to do a Web 2.0 workshop that is not the typical ed-tech geek approach of […] ➡
- 2005
- iBook Meltdown While editing some images in PhotoShop this morning, my home iBook (2002 vintage) went belly-up; the screen went to vertical bars and all attempts to restart produced no startup screen, no spinning of the drive. Realizing it is likely a significant hardware failure, I checked my AppleCare warranty and saw I had only 7 more […] ➡
- 2004
- Blogdigger in Action at UBC More fun for Greg at Blogdigger 😉 My colleague Brian Lamb shared some nifty web resources for a class he is teaching at University of British Columbia. Remember, Rip-Mix-Burn… Specifically, he has created (rip) a Bloggdigger Group (a collection of chosen RSS feeds), that is itself turned into an RSS feed (mix), and is embedded […] ➡
- The Sheer Ecstasy of Feedback From Afar Yesterday I was listening to a Electronic Portfolios Virtual Community of Practice chat session that swam around on the issues of “Digital Natives vs Digital Immigrants” and motivators for students to engage in eport activity. On reflection, I think the group under estimates the sheer power of having a personal publishing platform, especially if there […] ➡
- 2003
- Stupid Practice in Email Virus Protection Systems: Stop Spamming the Innocent This dog is angry. Spam is a reality, some 40% of email traffic. But there is absolutely no reason for the email scanning systems put in place to be sending reject emails back to accounts when the viruses generating them are spoofing (forging) the emails. I cannot be the only person wasting work time deleting […] ➡
- RSS feeds from my.OAI Dynamic RSS feeds are available now from searches performed at my.OAI, the tool for digging through a series of idatabases available as Open Archives. my.OAI is a full-featured search engine to a selected list of metadata databases from the Open Archives Initiative project. All searches performed at my.OAI, even is guest mode are returned with […] ➡
// 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.
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