“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 25 posts previously published on October 20th
- 2025
- CoolIris is BACK! It’s one thing to mutter promises of being back, it’s quite another to actually do it. Through an unlikely path (again), I have finally managed to resurrect the wall of media web presentation tool I ran with for a long while, that which was once known as CoolIris. This was something I fleshed out first […]
- 2020
- When a Blog Post About an Old Chair Turns into a Furniture Flea Market The best things in web serendipity are unforeseen. That’s the only way it works. It’s all because of rug shampooing. Back in 2017 at the house in Arizona, I decided to get the old whitish carpet steam cleaned, actually paying someone to do it and not futzing with those rental ones. I piled the furniture […]
- 2018
- The Road to Sharing is Not Paved With Licenses I’ll always take “Serendipity for 500”, Alex. There was a healthy, many pathed Twitter conversation yesterday started with a statement by Robin DeRosa Thinking of changing my @creativecommons default license from CCBY to CCBYNC. I get that CCBY is the more open technically, but I'm thinking here about my vision for open (in particular as […]
- 2016
- Be it ever so humble, the email of gratitude Can you really say thank you or express gratitude too much? I don’t think so, but then when you are on the receiving end, why does it feel so startling groovy? Prepare yourself for blog post number 343 on Attributing is a Good Thing. Yesterday, among the jetsam and flotsam of email, was a gem […]
- 2015
- Three Little Things People are out there Disrupting All Industries, Fixing Education, Saving the Environment. I salute the big visions. Me, I like to operate at the other end of the spectrum. The tiny things. Here’s three from just today that may not mean much for changing the world, but are significant to me. (1) I’ve written several […]
- Fishing For Prompts A few clicks ago, my friend/colleagued Geoff tweeted a suggesting for #NaNoWriMo participants to use prompts from his Vermont Young Writers Project (a great project itself) https://twitter.com/ggevalt/status/654631950918021120 Maha Bali picked up on this as a resource, and I piped in about offering ones I have used before for setting up DS106 Daily Creates. If you […]
- 2014
- Whatever Happened to Whatever Happened to Instructional Technology? Has anyone jumped any chasms lately? Once again, the associative trails in my cerebral memex fired off this morning. Via a tweet from Karen Fasimpaur, I watched Wes Fryer’s metaphor rich keynote Igniting Innovation in Teaching and Learning At 2:41 Wes introduced the Technology Adoption Curve, the notion based on Everett Rodgers Diffusion of Innovation […]
- 2011
- Mission Revealed I’ve lost any sense of what the search for the Center of the Internet means, but now, with the assistance of Obi Don Potter, I was able to get the message on the device left for me in Philadelphia. It appears I am needed to give a Storybox demo at Brock University, and I have […]
- New and Improved: More Options in pechaflickr I’ve heard requests from people using pechaflickr (http://pechaflickr.cogdogblog.com/) to be able to select a different interval between slides than the pecha kucha 20 seconds. You’ve been heard, I tinkered with the code last night and have revised the site- The front screen offers the basic 20×20- type a flickr tag, and it will spawn a […]
- 2010
- Bottled No More cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It’s been maybe two years since I bought a package of bottled water form the supermarket, but I’m always grabbing one at convenience stores while on the road. Living in the dry state of Arizona (dry as in lack of moisture) you learn to not go far without […]
- 2008
- In Progress more the engrish! This might be in Texas. Share this barking on social media
- The Death of TV As I Knew It flickr cc licensed photo by Kevin Steele I grew up immersed in, surrounded by, bombarded by television. As much as I complain about the generalizations of the “digital natives” I accept that somehow the absorption I had in television as the primary source of media must have shaped me. Somehow. I saw a lot of […]
- 2005
- Blog Cousin? How says there’s nothing worthy on blogrolls…. Found on a sidebar— is this a long lost blog cousin to CDB? http://sitcogblog.blogspot.com/ Strike out on Jakob’s Weblog Usability Law #1… Share this barking on social media
- RSS Mixers Part Deux My experiments with new services that offer tools to mix a set of different RSS feeds into one was interesting, and the comments brought in a few more. I’ve updated the original post to include: Aggrssive lazytom’s feedjumbler FEEDcombine Feed Findings FrankenFeed Feedjumbler had likely the easiest setup and mix of good output features, FrankenFeed […]
- Multipost Bookmarklet Tool Gets a Cleaning Thanks to an email from Ralph in Austria, I updated the bookmarklet tool for Simpy on my Multipost Bookmarklet Tool, the cheesy script I made for combining multiple social bookmark tools into one. Since these days I have pared my tool set down to one tasty tool, I have no idea if the others have […]
- TTLM/SAVD According to Molly’s Web Design and Development Personality Indicators: Frustrated with the range of attitudes and opinions I deal with as a standards-oriented educator, I’ve decided to begin a project (very) loosely based on the Meyers-Briggs personality indicators. So, dear readers, I’m hoping you’ll help me add and refine my categories, but I’m off to […]
- 2004
- EDUCAUSE: “At the End of the Day We Will Have Given it All Away: The Convergence of Open-Source CMS and Open Courseware” Free content for community colleges (well and everybody else)! Free! Developing content based on model of MIT Open CourseWare success, but for community college level courses. Foothill-De Anza approached by Hewlett Foundation to lead effort for more general education level courses, community college level curriculum. Based on success with FHDA success in ETUDES (Easy To […]
- EDUCAUSE: “Electronic Portfolios in Higher Education: Where Are We and Where Are We Going?” From the folks at the University of Denver Portfolio Community: The University of Denver Portfolio Community is a comprehensive electronic portfolio system that supports individual, course, and community portfolios and curriculum assessment. This session will discuss the DUPC’s development and lessons learned during its implementation and compare it to other electronic portfolio systems.. Began work […]
- EDUCAUSE: “Universal Design and the Web: Strategies and Techniques” A solid session by Terry Thompson with University of Washington’s National Center on Accessible Information Technology in Education on the concept if Universal Design for web content. (excuse the post-blogging– the wireless in the session room is not there or off the map). The materials and the resources on the AccessIT site are worth a […]
- Rip. Mix. Feed. Objects? EDUCAUSE 2004 Seminar Today, Brian Lamb and I pulled of another rollercoaster wild ride presentation, one that more or less emerged and arose from the primordial soup of our minds 2 weeks ago, The long scrolling title for today’s pre-conference Seminar was “Decentralization of Learning Resources: Syndicating Learning Objects Using RSS, Trackback, and Related Technologies” where we initially planned […]
- 2003
- International Exports? Milwaukee’s Safe House One of the best diversions in Milwaukee from the League for Innovation conference we found was a dinner at the Safe House. Following the address to a door in an alley marked “International Exports”, we had to use all of our sites to get ourselves inside. Beyond that, I am sworn to secrecy, but see […]
- League Bloggin’: Land of 10,000 E-Folios Just a quick recap of this League Conference session, “Minnesota: Land of 10,000 E-Folios” by Paul Wasko of eFolio Minnesota the project providing electronic portfolios to all citizens of the state. This was a hands on session that allowed us as participants to create use the tools available in this software. It actually is very […]
- League Bloggin’: Diana Oblinger keynote Now this was a League conference highlight. Diana Oblinger knows how to deliver a compelling presentation (she speaks, she does not read) on a relevant topic. She researches and presents data, references, processes, and important ideas. And she uses PowerPoint with a bit more power and point than most. Someone give video copies of her […]
- League Bloggin’: MLX Wow, now this was probably the best presentation at this conference…. wait a minute…. Can I blog my own presentation at the League for Innovation Conference? (well not while I am doing it). This morning we gave our show on Building an Innovation Collection (with a bit of Competition and Bribery). We of course got […]
- League Bloggin’: “Sturgeon’s Law, Home Depot, and Dilbert’s Boss” Monday morning here at the League for Innovation conference and I was asked by my Macromedia friends to make some remarks at their breakfast session- a packed room of about 50 or so. And then I was following an awesome series of examples and ideas from Bill and Eric two faculty from Sinclair College that […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 25 posts previously published on October 20th
- 2025
- CoolIris is BACK! It’s one thing to mutter promises of being back, it’s quite another to actually do it. Through an unlikely path (again), I have finally managed to resurrect the wall of media web presentation tool I ran with for a long while, that which was once known as CoolIris. This was something I fleshed out first […] ➡
- 2020
- 2018
- The Road to Sharing is Not Paved With Licenses I’ll always take “Serendipity for 500”, Alex. There was a healthy, many pathed Twitter conversation yesterday started with a statement by Robin DeRosa Thinking of changing my @creativecommons default license from CCBY to CCBYNC. I get that CCBY is the more open technically, but I'm thinking here about my vision for open (in particular as […] ➡
- 2016
- Be it ever so humble, the email of gratitude Can you really say thank you or express gratitude too much? I don’t think so, but then when you are on the receiving end, why does it feel so startling groovy? Prepare yourself for blog post number 343 on Attributing is a Good Thing. Yesterday, among the jetsam and flotsam of email, was a gem […] ➡
- 2015
- Three Little Things People are out there Disrupting All Industries, Fixing Education, Saving the Environment. I salute the big visions. Me, I like to operate at the other end of the spectrum. The tiny things. Here’s three from just today that may not mean much for changing the world, but are significant to me. (1) I’ve written several […] ➡
- Fishing For Prompts A few clicks ago, my friend/colleagued Geoff tweeted a suggesting for #NaNoWriMo participants to use prompts from his Vermont Young Writers Project (a great project itself) https://twitter.com/ggevalt/status/654631950918021120 Maha Bali picked up on this as a resource, and I piped in about offering ones I have used before for setting up DS106 Daily Creates. If you […] ➡
- 2014
- Whatever Happened to Whatever Happened to Instructional Technology? Has anyone jumped any chasms lately? Once again, the associative trails in my cerebral memex fired off this morning. Via a tweet from Karen Fasimpaur, I watched Wes Fryer’s metaphor rich keynote Igniting Innovation in Teaching and Learning At 2:41 Wes introduced the Technology Adoption Curve, the notion based on Everett Rodgers Diffusion of Innovation […] ➡
- 2011
- Mission Revealed I’ve lost any sense of what the search for the Center of the Internet means, but now, with the assistance of Obi Don Potter, I was able to get the message on the device left for me in Philadelphia. It appears I am needed to give a Storybox demo at Brock University, and I have […] ➡
- New and Improved: More Options in pechaflickr I’ve heard requests from people using pechaflickr (http://pechaflickr.cogdogblog.com/) to be able to select a different interval between slides than the pecha kucha 20 seconds. You’ve been heard, I tinkered with the code last night and have revised the site- The front screen offers the basic 20×20- type a flickr tag, and it will spawn a […] ➡
- 2010
- Bottled No More cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It’s been maybe two years since I bought a package of bottled water form the supermarket, but I’m always grabbing one at convenience stores while on the road. Living in the dry state of Arizona (dry as in lack of moisture) you learn to not go far without […] ➡
- 2008
- In Progress more the engrish! This might be in Texas. Share this barking on social media ➡
- The Death of TV As I Knew It flickr cc licensed photo by Kevin Steele I grew up immersed in, surrounded by, bombarded by television. As much as I complain about the generalizations of the “digital natives” I accept that somehow the absorption I had in television as the primary source of media must have shaped me. Somehow. I saw a lot of […] ➡
- 2005
- Blog Cousin? How says there’s nothing worthy on blogrolls…. Found on a sidebar— is this a long lost blog cousin to CDB? http://sitcogblog.blogspot.com/ Strike out on Jakob’s Weblog Usability Law #1… Share this barking on social media ➡
- RSS Mixers Part Deux My experiments with new services that offer tools to mix a set of different RSS feeds into one was interesting, and the comments brought in a few more. I’ve updated the original post to include: Aggrssive lazytom’s feedjumbler FEEDcombine Feed Findings FrankenFeed Feedjumbler had likely the easiest setup and mix of good output features, FrankenFeed […] ➡
- Multipost Bookmarklet Tool Gets a Cleaning Thanks to an email from Ralph in Austria, I updated the bookmarklet tool for Simpy on my Multipost Bookmarklet Tool, the cheesy script I made for combining multiple social bookmark tools into one. Since these days I have pared my tool set down to one tasty tool, I have no idea if the others have […] ➡
- TTLM/SAVD According to Molly’s Web Design and Development Personality Indicators: Frustrated with the range of attitudes and opinions I deal with as a standards-oriented educator, I’ve decided to begin a project (very) loosely based on the Meyers-Briggs personality indicators. So, dear readers, I’m hoping you’ll help me add and refine my categories, but I’m off to […] ➡
- 2004
- EDUCAUSE: “At the End of the Day We Will Have Given it All Away: The Convergence of Open-Source CMS and Open Courseware” Free content for community colleges (well and everybody else)! Free! Developing content based on model of MIT Open CourseWare success, but for community college level courses. Foothill-De Anza approached by Hewlett Foundation to lead effort for more general education level courses, community college level curriculum. Based on success with FHDA success in ETUDES (Easy To […] ➡
- EDUCAUSE: “Electronic Portfolios in Higher Education: Where Are We and Where Are We Going?” From the folks at the University of Denver Portfolio Community: The University of Denver Portfolio Community is a comprehensive electronic portfolio system that supports individual, course, and community portfolios and curriculum assessment. This session will discuss the DUPC’s development and lessons learned during its implementation and compare it to other electronic portfolio systems.. Began work […] ➡
- EDUCAUSE: “Universal Design and the Web: Strategies and Techniques” A solid session by Terry Thompson with University of Washington’s National Center on Accessible Information Technology in Education on the concept if Universal Design for web content. (excuse the post-blogging– the wireless in the session room is not there or off the map). The materials and the resources on the AccessIT site are worth a […] ➡
- Rip. Mix. Feed. Objects? EDUCAUSE 2004 Seminar Today, Brian Lamb and I pulled of another rollercoaster wild ride presentation, one that more or less emerged and arose from the primordial soup of our minds 2 weeks ago, The long scrolling title for today’s pre-conference Seminar was “Decentralization of Learning Resources: Syndicating Learning Objects Using RSS, Trackback, and Related Technologies” where we initially planned […] ➡
- 2003
- International Exports? Milwaukee’s Safe House One of the best diversions in Milwaukee from the League for Innovation conference we found was a dinner at the Safe House. Following the address to a door in an alley marked “International Exports”, we had to use all of our sites to get ourselves inside. Beyond that, I am sworn to secrecy, but see […] ➡
- League Bloggin’: Land of 10,000 E-Folios Just a quick recap of this League Conference session, “Minnesota: Land of 10,000 E-Folios” by Paul Wasko of eFolio Minnesota the project providing electronic portfolios to all citizens of the state. This was a hands on session that allowed us as participants to create use the tools available in this software. It actually is very […] ➡
- League Bloggin’: Diana Oblinger keynote Now this was a League conference highlight. Diana Oblinger knows how to deliver a compelling presentation (she speaks, she does not read) on a relevant topic. She researches and presents data, references, processes, and important ideas. And she uses PowerPoint with a bit more power and point than most. Someone give video copies of her […] ➡
- League Bloggin’: MLX Wow, now this was probably the best presentation at this conference…. wait a minute…. Can I blog my own presentation at the League for Innovation Conference? (well not while I am doing it). This morning we gave our show on Building an Innovation Collection (with a bit of Competition and Bribery). We of course got […] ➡
- League Bloggin’: “Sturgeon’s Law, Home Depot, and Dilbert’s Boss” Monday morning here at the League for Innovation conference and I was asked by my Macromedia friends to make some remarks at their breakfast session- a packed room of about 50 or so. And then I was following an awesome series of examples and ideas from Bill and Eric two faculty from Sinclair College that […] ➡
// 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
