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 13 posts previously published on May 1st

2025Busting Through the Wall at Four (months of daily photos) Last year my daily photo practice went out the window in April, I can fathom excuses from conference and vacation travel, but I lost my mojo for months. I am on track for a perfect fourth month – today on April 30, the 120th day of the years, I am sporting the same number in […]
2019Vestigial Features: On Splotology and Phylogeny (with some apologies to Stephen Jay Gould) SPLOTs evolve? Well yes. I’m starting some new work with Daniel Villar-Onrubia at Coventry, where they seem to have taken a shine to SPLOTs. It was their creative ideas for using the TRU Writer and TRU Collector SPLOTs that led to me adding features I had not anticipated. […]
2016Dad’s Estimate Sheets; 15 Shy of 90 May 2 could have been my Dad’s 90th birthday, but the only notched 75. Just fathoming that the last birthday he saw, and I saw, was fifteen years ago. I was planning to visit him in Florida for a special birthday, but no one in the family expected that birthday would be in the hospital. […] Stop The Madness: The Proliferation of The 60000 Times Faster Myth Dances On It’s been a while since I devoted what is most likely wasted energy into debunking the oft repeated assertion that “people process images 60,000 times faster than text”. If this sounds like something you have heard, seen in a presentation, or book, and it sounds “truthy”, please stop and read my background work. I forgot […]
2013More Stories, Please? cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Christian O. Harris On May 15th I am bringing a new round of Amazing True Stories of Openness to the Yavapai College Summer Institute and guess what? I WANT MOTE STORIES! A few people said they would do these last time, and fell short. […]
2011May Story a Day #1: Howard B Camplese Since I started May 2nd on my May Marathon of One Digital Story Per Day (#mayday), I am missing the first day of the month. So, while anyone can blog three times a day, I have gotten 2 stories done since being on the train 3 hours from Castleton Vermont. Did you know that Howard […]
2009The New 50… 67 Web 2 Ways To Tell a Story (with CoolIris!) Today was a full on day at the opening end of a 2 week road dog trip around New England. Yesterday I flew into Newark, and did the train into New York for today’s fantastic experience at the Annual Symposium on Communication and Communication Intensive Instruction at Baruch College, thanks to a generous invitation form […]
2007Tweety Bird I promise this is the last thing I will blog about twitter…. today. Moreso than the back and forth about twitter being the Signpost of Doom that People Need to Get a Life, vs the It’s Just Great to Banter with People I Like, it is amazing how quickly it is moving as a techno-meme. […]
2006iRiver? Fuggedaboudit! iAudio We Go The Ritz Camera folks had no ability to let me now which month, year, or century the iRiver I ordered might arrive, so at least they were nice enough to cancel the order (I was a bit over barking as they would not charge my credit card until the item shipped). I opted for Miguel’s […]
200410 Years of Writing HTML Tutorial Sometime recently we passed another milestone in the 10th year of continuous web presence by our Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction. In Spring of 1994 we were doing support for faculty at South Mountain Community College in helping them get started with a local “center” for teaching, learning, and technology– we had convinced the […] 16 New MLX Packages (or at least Assembled Boxes) Yesterday the inventory at the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) climbed higher. As blogged earlier, the Civic Responsibility: From Awareness to Commitment Dialogue Day held yesterday (Apr 30, 2004) included activities where faculty from across our system submitted to the MLX their lesson ideas the involved some aspect of Civic Engagement- from a range of disciplines […] Quick Quick Web- Wiki’s Explained in Plain English Over at Common Craft, you can now find Wikis Described in Plain English: You may have seen the word “wiki” used to describe a website used by a group to collaborate. My intent with this post is to describe wikis and the basics of how they work- in plain English. It is not bad, but […]
2003Mosaic Decade A friend and colleague from Melbourne (.au) recently e-mailed some humorous recollections marking the 10th anniversary of NCSA Mosaic. “Does that make you feel old?” 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 13 posts previously published on May 1st

2025Busting Through the Wall at Four (months of daily photos) Last year my daily photo practice went out the window in April, I can fathom excuses from conference and vacation travel, but I lost my mojo for months. I am on track for a perfect fourth month – today on April 30, the 120th day of the years, I am sporting the same number in […] &amp#x27A1;
2019Vestigial Features: On Splotology and Phylogeny (with some apologies to Stephen Jay Gould) SPLOTs evolve? Well yes. I’m starting some new work with Daniel Villar-Onrubia at Coventry, where they seem to have taken a shine to SPLOTs. It was their creative ideas for using the TRU Writer and TRU Collector SPLOTs that led to me adding features I had not anticipated. […] &amp#x27A1;
2016Dad’s Estimate Sheets; 15 Shy of 90 May 2 could have been my Dad’s 90th birthday, but the only notched 75. Just fathoming that the last birthday he saw, and I saw, was fifteen years ago. I was planning to visit him in Florida for a special birthday, but no one in the family expected that birthday would be in the hospital. […] &amp#x27A1; Stop The Madness: The Proliferation of The 60000 Times Faster Myth Dances On It’s been a while since I devoted what is most likely wasted energy into debunking the oft repeated assertion that “people process images 60,000 times faster than text”. If this sounds like something you have heard, seen in a presentation, or book, and it sounds “truthy”, please stop and read my background work. I forgot […] &amp#x27A1;
2013More Stories, Please? cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Christian O. Harris On May 15th I am bringing a new round of Amazing True Stories of Openness to the Yavapai College Summer Institute and guess what? I WANT MOTE STORIES! A few people said they would do these last time, and fell short. […] &amp#x27A1;
2011May Story a Day #1: Howard B Camplese Since I started May 2nd on my May Marathon of One Digital Story Per Day (#mayday), I am missing the first day of the month. So, while anyone can blog three times a day, I have gotten 2 stories done since being on the train 3 hours from Castleton Vermont. Did you know that Howard […] &amp#x27A1;
2009The New 50… 67 Web 2 Ways To Tell a Story (with CoolIris!) Today was a full on day at the opening end of a 2 week road dog trip around New England. Yesterday I flew into Newark, and did the train into New York for today’s fantastic experience at the Annual Symposium on Communication and Communication Intensive Instruction at Baruch College, thanks to a generous invitation form […] &amp#x27A1;
2007Tweety Bird I promise this is the last thing I will blog about twitter…. today. Moreso than the back and forth about twitter being the Signpost of Doom that People Need to Get a Life, vs the It’s Just Great to Banter with People I Like, it is amazing how quickly it is moving as a techno-meme. […] &amp#x27A1;
2006iRiver? Fuggedaboudit! iAudio We Go The Ritz Camera folks had no ability to let me now which month, year, or century the iRiver I ordered might arrive, so at least they were nice enough to cancel the order (I was a bit over barking as they would not charge my credit card until the item shipped). I opted for Miguel’s […] &amp#x27A1;
200410 Years of Writing HTML Tutorial Sometime recently we passed another milestone in the 10th year of continuous web presence by our Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction. In Spring of 1994 we were doing support for faculty at South Mountain Community College in helping them get started with a local “center” for teaching, learning, and technology– we had convinced the […] &amp#x27A1; 16 New MLX Packages (or at least Assembled Boxes) Yesterday the inventory at the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) climbed higher. As blogged earlier, the Civic Responsibility: From Awareness to Commitment Dialogue Day held yesterday (Apr 30, 2004) included activities where faculty from across our system submitted to the MLX their lesson ideas the involved some aspect of Civic Engagement- from a range of disciplines […] &amp#x27A1; Quick Quick Web- Wiki’s Explained in Plain English Over at Common Craft, you can now find Wikis Described in Plain English: You may have seen the word “wiki” used to describe a website used by a group to collaborate. My intent with this post is to describe wikis and the basics of how they work- in plain English. It is not bad, but […] &amp#x27A1;
2003Mosaic Decade A friend and colleague from Melbourne (.au) recently e-mailed some humorous recollections marking the 10th anniversary of NCSA Mosaic. “Does that make you feel old?” 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.