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 20 posts previously published on January 29th

2025Dumping That Load Was So Easy I Forgot I Did it Two Months Ago Getting rid of crap is very satisfying. Especially large piles of stuff that maybe once had value, but now just reeks with the stench of rotting, wet discard food. Pressing the dump lever was quite easy. In fact, after dumping, I went on, and forgot that I had done this. Done what? It was actually […]
2024No Matter How Much I Stomp on the Delay Pedal Said pedal has no effect on time (me writing the obvious). I am among many many colleagues and friends who have been fortunate to have known, collaborated with, presented with, learned from, played music with or just have had a meaningful conversation with Irwin Devries. His last guitar chord hopefully still rings on in some […]
2022To Umm or Not To Umm, That is the Audio Editing Question I’m back in the podcast editing saddle with two sessions parked in Audacity for the OEG Voices show and hoping I can pin Antonio Vantaggiato down (or get my own schedule in order) for an overdue Puerto Rico Connection episode. But there is ummmm, something that I have ummmm, being pondering. To me, a universal […]
2020Net Mirror is the New #NetNarr It’s back. It’s dark, reflective, you are looking into it. It looks “off”. But it’s not. It’s looking at you. Is it? This is the 2020 iteration of a recast Network Narratives, the course I’ve co-taught (completely remotely) at Kean University with Mia Zamora. Things are different this time around, start with the intro that […]
2019#netnarr Select, Click, ROT Magic We have some fun in Networked Narratives with coded messages using rot13. Just look at the Daily Digital Alchemy 243: It’s just a simple cipher that works by changing each letter in a word to the one that is 13 letters after (wrapping around after Z). It’s nifty, because being half of the number of […]
2017With This Icicle I Change a Mountain (and in explore, too) I went out on a walk seeking a simple photo of a mountain to use in a class assignment. We have plenty of mountains where I live (I can see one from my back deck), but it’s good to try some different shots. Getting to this ridge means walking a steep dirt driveway to a […] Five Card Flickr Stories… Keeps on Ticking It’s been years since I even looked at my own site. I made Five Card Flickr Stories back in 2008 (early blog post). It’s likely the first site I built using an API, and because flickr (who always gets sand kicked in their face) is one of the few web services that has not crapped […]
2014#FutureEd, An Hour of Video, and April 22, 1993? I have broken some new ground, a MOOC PR. For the first time, I watched a complete week’s worth of video, an hour for a Coursera course (I always feel like adding an extra sera again, “course sera sera, what ever will be will be…). I want to give the Future of Education: blah blah […]
2013Oh Brother Here is another story demo for ds106, using my Five Card Flickr Stories site to generate a story from 5 random photos drawn from the Daily Create pool. I still find these a lot of fun. Five Card Story: Oh Brother a The Daily Create story created by CogDog flickr photo by Michael Branson Smith […] Make The Call This is a demo of a ds106 assignment for my students to get a taste of telling stories with pictures. The task is to use two different photos from recent Daily Create Photo assignments and tie them together with a story, a sandwich if you will. Where am I? Bad dream? Last thing I remember […]
2010Fantabulous Posterous I was impressed with posterous when I first set my paws on it in August 2008. It is the web site you can build a blog, even a shared collaborative one, via the complex blog authoring platform — email. You can set up a site instantly, with no account needed upfront, and that in itself […]
2007And Then There Was One (Laptop) And Then There Was One (Laptop)available on flickr Now that is a clean desktop! Over the weekend, I used the OS X migration assistant to move my files and music (a paltry 6 Gb) from the old iBook (vintage 2003) to a separate user account on my MacBook Pro. I have gone from Three laptops […] Su Horizon no es mi Horizon Last week was long, I am sure there were 16 days crammed into it. This included flying to Atlanta for the EDUCAUSE/ELI conference, presenting twice on Monday, exiting early Tuesday to hop a flight to Dallas, and being part of a trio running a 3 day workshop. After a late Friday night arrival at home, […]
2005Poking Around Weather via WAP/WML As a geek happens a lot- I get curious and start poking around on the net, peeking at web page source code. Tonight, I was checking out the NOAA weather forecast for near our cabin and there was a little note near the top: New! Cell Phone (wap) URL: www.srh.noaa.gov/wml Now I have a stone […] Word Salad Spam Poetry Rummaging quickly through my filtered email (some legit things keep falling through), I came across one of those ones with 2 cryptic links and then a whole raft of random words. I think the intent is to try and flood or fool email filters (but this is my un-educated guess, but see The War On […] Jade Hiccup Sometime between 1:00 Am yesterday and 11:00 am today I think this server was down– I could not ping it nor access any content on it. I was rather worried, knowing that there are many people using Feed2JS for their sites, and the sites will just stay in an endless attempt at loading if the […] My Messy Pile of Leaf Tags The new Journal Of the Hyperlinked Organization (JOHO) metaphorically paints folksomony and controlled vocabularies as “trees vs leaves”: Folksonomies are different in important ways from top-down, hierarchical taxonomies — the shape we’ve assumed knowledge itself takes. The old way gets some experts together who create a nested tree of concepts into which everything in a […]
2004Motivating Drivers- One Person’s Actions Drives Learning E-mail Filters I’ve always had this fascination in the large scale effects from small points of change, punctuated equilbrium not just in evolution and white water rafter trips, but also in human nature (anyone with me on that one?) Actually, I was thinking about a vocal faculty member in our college system that for sake of vagueness, […] The Pachyderm is Coming to Town No, this is not about the circus. Well, we hope not. Tomorrow (Jan 30) is our Pachyderm: Building Meaningful Content with Learning Objects Dialogue Day event for about 70 registered participants from our colleges, held at Paradise Valley Community College (our “Dialogue Days” are one day special events, workshops, etc that are organized by our […] Conversing with Symantec E-mail Virus Bouncebacks This morning’s unwanted, unwarranted, un-necessary e-mail virus bounceback count = 127 mass deleted. Let’s talk with Symantec’s email message, sent personally to me: Share this barking on social media

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

On Michael’s site he might use

There are 20 posts previously published on January 29th

2025Dumping That Load Was So Easy I Forgot I Did it Two Months Ago Getting rid of crap is very satisfying. Especially large piles of stuff that maybe once had value, but now just reeks with the stench of rotting, wet discard food. Pressing the dump lever was quite easy. In fact, after dumping, I went on, and forgot that I had done this. Done what? It was actually […] &amp#x27A1;
2024No Matter How Much I Stomp on the Delay Pedal Said pedal has no effect on time (me writing the obvious). I am among many many colleagues and friends who have been fortunate to have known, collaborated with, presented with, learned from, played music with or just have had a meaningful conversation with Irwin Devries. His last guitar chord hopefully still rings on in some […] &amp#x27A1;
2022To Umm or Not To Umm, That is the Audio Editing Question I’m back in the podcast editing saddle with two sessions parked in Audacity for the OEG Voices show and hoping I can pin Antonio Vantaggiato down (or get my own schedule in order) for an overdue Puerto Rico Connection episode. But there is ummmm, something that I have ummmm, being pondering. To me, a universal […] &amp#x27A1;
2020Net Mirror is the New #NetNarr It’s back. It’s dark, reflective, you are looking into it. It looks “off”. But it’s not. It’s looking at you. Is it? This is the 2020 iteration of a recast Network Narratives, the course I’ve co-taught (completely remotely) at Kean University with Mia Zamora. Things are different this time around, start with the intro that […] &amp#x27A1;
2019#netnarr Select, Click, ROT Magic We have some fun in Networked Narratives with coded messages using rot13. Just look at the Daily Digital Alchemy 243: It’s just a simple cipher that works by changing each letter in a word to the one that is 13 letters after (wrapping around after Z). It’s nifty, because being half of the number of […] &amp#x27A1;
2017With This Icicle I Change a Mountain (and in explore, too) I went out on a walk seeking a simple photo of a mountain to use in a class assignment. We have plenty of mountains where I live (I can see one from my back deck), but it’s good to try some different shots. Getting to this ridge means walking a steep dirt driveway to a […] &amp#x27A1; Five Card Flickr Stories… Keeps on Ticking It’s been years since I even looked at my own site. I made Five Card Flickr Stories back in 2008 (early blog post). It’s likely the first site I built using an API, and because flickr (who always gets sand kicked in their face) is one of the few web services that has not crapped […] &amp#x27A1;
2014#FutureEd, An Hour of Video, and April 22, 1993? I have broken some new ground, a MOOC PR. For the first time, I watched a complete week’s worth of video, an hour for a Coursera course (I always feel like adding an extra sera again, “course sera sera, what ever will be will be…). I want to give the Future of Education: blah blah […] &amp#x27A1;
2013Oh Brother Here is another story demo for ds106, using my Five Card Flickr Stories site to generate a story from 5 random photos drawn from the Daily Create pool. I still find these a lot of fun. Five Card Story: Oh Brother a The Daily Create story created by CogDog flickr photo by Michael Branson Smith […] &amp#x27A1; Make The Call This is a demo of a ds106 assignment for my students to get a taste of telling stories with pictures. The task is to use two different photos from recent Daily Create Photo assignments and tie them together with a story, a sandwich if you will. Where am I? Bad dream? Last thing I remember […] &amp#x27A1;
2010Fantabulous Posterous I was impressed with posterous when I first set my paws on it in August 2008. It is the web site you can build a blog, even a shared collaborative one, via the complex blog authoring platform — email. You can set up a site instantly, with no account needed upfront, and that in itself […] &amp#x27A1;
2007And Then There Was One (Laptop) And Then There Was One (Laptop)available on flickr Now that is a clean desktop! Over the weekend, I used the OS X migration assistant to move my files and music (a paltry 6 Gb) from the old iBook (vintage 2003) to a separate user account on my MacBook Pro. I have gone from Three laptops […] &amp#x27A1; Su Horizon no es mi Horizon Last week was long, I am sure there were 16 days crammed into it. This included flying to Atlanta for the EDUCAUSE/ELI conference, presenting twice on Monday, exiting early Tuesday to hop a flight to Dallas, and being part of a trio running a 3 day workshop. After a late Friday night arrival at home, […] &amp#x27A1;
2005Poking Around Weather via WAP/WML As a geek happens a lot- I get curious and start poking around on the net, peeking at web page source code. Tonight, I was checking out the NOAA weather forecast for near our cabin and there was a little note near the top: New! Cell Phone (wap) URL: www.srh.noaa.gov/wml Now I have a stone […] &amp#x27A1; Word Salad Spam Poetry Rummaging quickly through my filtered email (some legit things keep falling through), I came across one of those ones with 2 cryptic links and then a whole raft of random words. I think the intent is to try and flood or fool email filters (but this is my un-educated guess, but see The War On […] &amp#x27A1; Jade Hiccup Sometime between 1:00 Am yesterday and 11:00 am today I think this server was down– I could not ping it nor access any content on it. I was rather worried, knowing that there are many people using Feed2JS for their sites, and the sites will just stay in an endless attempt at loading if the […] &amp#x27A1; My Messy Pile of Leaf Tags The new Journal Of the Hyperlinked Organization (JOHO) metaphorically paints folksomony and controlled vocabularies as “trees vs leaves”: Folksonomies are different in important ways from top-down, hierarchical taxonomies — the shape we’ve assumed knowledge itself takes. The old way gets some experts together who create a nested tree of concepts into which everything in a […] &amp#x27A1;
2004Motivating Drivers- One Person’s Actions Drives Learning E-mail Filters I’ve always had this fascination in the large scale effects from small points of change, punctuated equilbrium not just in evolution and white water rafter trips, but also in human nature (anyone with me on that one?) Actually, I was thinking about a vocal faculty member in our college system that for sake of vagueness, […] &amp#x27A1; The Pachyderm is Coming to Town No, this is not about the circus. Well, we hope not. Tomorrow (Jan 30) is our Pachyderm: Building Meaningful Content with Learning Objects Dialogue Day event for about 70 registered participants from our colleges, held at Paradise Valley Community College (our “Dialogue Days” are one day special events, workshops, etc that are organized by our […] &amp#x27A1; Conversing with Symantec E-mail Virus Bouncebacks This morning’s unwanted, unwarranted, un-necessary e-mail virus bounceback count = 127 mass deleted. Let’s talk with Symantec’s email message, sent personally to me: Share this barking on social media &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.