“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 15 posts previously published on July 26th
- 2025
- On De-Siding Almost some fraction of a lifetime later, I am looking at my own house of truth as having been shaped as much as what I was taught by as much as what was never taught. Or Alan gets grapples with what the big academics talk about as positionally. And in so many big things in […]
- In The Air: CogDogDrone For all the eager fans (perhaps that is singular) looking for the latest video from the dog drone in the sky, CogDogDrone, we had scheduled a spring flight to take the first overview of the land since the winter. However, we had technical difficulties (aka, a pilot over-estimating skills to fly through a barn). There […]
- 2020
- This is Us I am drafting this post using a tool I rarely use for blogging: This tool choice might change. The current setting is Cori and seated in soft chairs settled in the middle of a small creek, water rushing beneath our seats and over our toes. It’s cold, rather refreshing on a day when it is […]
- 2018
- SPLOT and Calling Card One Click Installs Ignited at Reclaim Hosting Coming soon to a cpanel near you (if you are hosted by Reclaim Hosting) My favorite work over the last few years, spawned by the Open Learning Fellowship at TRU set up for me by Brian Lamb, has been the development of WordPress themes that turn a vanilla bloggy type site into a functional web […]
- 2014
- Project SSD Complete! It took a new laptop, 3 or 4 trips of cracking open the case, and almost a year– but I finally have my old (2009 Mid Year) Mac Book Pro running from a Solid State Drive (SSD). And like I was told, the speed difference in that machine is remarkable. Startup time was about 4 […]
- 2010
- It’s All Cat Videos If I was teaching a class in logic, I would frequently use the Chronicle of Higher Education as a rich resource– of faulty logic. Hardly a day passes in the feed reader without some preaching headline that one cannot get from point A to B without a psychic leap of thinking. Try this one on. […]
- Amazing Stories Took a Wrong Turn At Albuquerque I’m going to leave it to John Ittelson to tell the full story, but I am a bit embarrassed to all my friends and colleagues who responded to my call for More Amazing Stories of Sharing. Like the wascally wabbit, there was a mixup, and the event at which this new version was supposed to […]
- 2008
- Dr. Glu: “Blogs are hydroponic farms…” You don’t have to be a “post some silly movie or photo or rant” every day blogger to be effective. When my RSS Reader lights up with a new post from Gardner Campbell, I drop what I am doing to go read. If you are an educator interested in blogging, wiki, web tools for learning, […]
- Lovely Walk Down Shockwave Nostalgia Lane Woah! I found out today my old Shockwave projects can breathe again! I cut my multimedia teeth in the 1990s on Macromedia Director. I was happy in the early part of that decade pounding around HyperCard and then came along a project (something to do with Study Skills) that required a lot of animation and […]
- 2007
- Internet Chemistry Time to dust off your memory cells for how the Period Table of the Elements is organized — but now it is mashedup, recast, and graphicly spun into a new version where websites replace the elements. Get ready to play with the Periodic Table of the Internet: It’s really fun, and interactive, and an interesting […]
- 2006
- Start With The ______ flickr foto Cut on the Dotted Lines (1)available on flickr Phase 12 of our pool remodel job– half of our decking is in sad shape due to settling, so tomorrow it gets jack hammered out. Or this is yet another iteration of Levine’s Law of Presentations… "Start with the _______" A visual representation for so-called […]
- It’s Back! flickr foto It’s Back!available on flickr There’s joy in Sun-ville! My MacBookPro has returned, outfitted with a new fan, logic board, and something else I am forgetting. And for speed, I added another 1 Gb of RAM. Let’s Rock! With all new guts… it was almost 2 weeks since I took in the MBP because […]
- 2005
- The Important Ear Bud Update Breaking News! Based on all the feedback on my complaints about the slippery ear buds that came with my iPod Shuffle, I googled for the suggested Sony brand, and quickly found the Sony MDR-EX81LP buds at Amazon for $32 clams. And in white cables to match the pod. But what an even nicer surprise when […]
- Moving the House (and hoping none of the occupants notice) Today was time to knuckle down and get some work done. I am about 80% done moving an entire nested web site with connected database to a new server (this is going from a Linux running on a PC platform to our enterprise web server), and trying to get all the walls, roofs, and floors […]
- iWant iPod Flea Not yet available in any stores! iPod Flea commercial I’m working now in a FleaCast. (Another fine Kotke remaidered link) Share this barking on social media
On Michael’s site he might use There are 15 posts previously published on July 26th
- 2025
- On De-Siding Almost some fraction of a lifetime later, I am looking at my own house of truth as having been shaped as much as what I was taught by as much as what was never taught. Or Alan gets grapples with what the big academics talk about as positionally. And in so many big things in […] ➡
- In The Air: CogDogDrone For all the eager fans (perhaps that is singular) looking for the latest video from the dog drone in the sky, CogDogDrone, we had scheduled a spring flight to take the first overview of the land since the winter. However, we had technical difficulties (aka, a pilot over-estimating skills to fly through a barn). There […] ➡
- 2020
- This is Us I am drafting this post using a tool I rarely use for blogging: This tool choice might change. The current setting is Cori and seated in soft chairs settled in the middle of a small creek, water rushing beneath our seats and over our toes. It’s cold, rather refreshing on a day when it is […] ➡
- 2018
- 2014
- Project SSD Complete! It took a new laptop, 3 or 4 trips of cracking open the case, and almost a year– but I finally have my old (2009 Mid Year) Mac Book Pro running from a Solid State Drive (SSD). And like I was told, the speed difference in that machine is remarkable. Startup time was about 4 […] ➡
- 2010
- It’s All Cat Videos If I was teaching a class in logic, I would frequently use the Chronicle of Higher Education as a rich resource– of faulty logic. Hardly a day passes in the feed reader without some preaching headline that one cannot get from point A to B without a psychic leap of thinking. Try this one on. […] ➡
- Amazing Stories Took a Wrong Turn At Albuquerque I’m going to leave it to John Ittelson to tell the full story, but I am a bit embarrassed to all my friends and colleagues who responded to my call for More Amazing Stories of Sharing. Like the wascally wabbit, there was a mixup, and the event at which this new version was supposed to […] ➡
- 2008
- Dr. Glu: “Blogs are hydroponic farms…” You don’t have to be a “post some silly movie or photo or rant” every day blogger to be effective. When my RSS Reader lights up with a new post from Gardner Campbell, I drop what I am doing to go read. If you are an educator interested in blogging, wiki, web tools for learning, […] ➡
- Lovely Walk Down Shockwave Nostalgia Lane Woah! I found out today my old Shockwave projects can breathe again! I cut my multimedia teeth in the 1990s on Macromedia Director. I was happy in the early part of that decade pounding around HyperCard and then came along a project (something to do with Study Skills) that required a lot of animation and […] ➡
- 2007
- Internet Chemistry Time to dust off your memory cells for how the Period Table of the Elements is organized — but now it is mashedup, recast, and graphicly spun into a new version where websites replace the elements. Get ready to play with the Periodic Table of the Internet: It’s really fun, and interactive, and an interesting […] ➡
- 2006
- Start With The ______ flickr foto Cut on the Dotted Lines (1)available on flickr Phase 12 of our pool remodel job– half of our decking is in sad shape due to settling, so tomorrow it gets jack hammered out. Or this is yet another iteration of Levine’s Law of Presentations… "Start with the _______" A visual representation for so-called […] ➡
- It’s Back! flickr foto It’s Back!available on flickr There’s joy in Sun-ville! My MacBookPro has returned, outfitted with a new fan, logic board, and something else I am forgetting. And for speed, I added another 1 Gb of RAM. Let’s Rock! With all new guts… it was almost 2 weeks since I took in the MBP because […] ➡
- 2005
- The Important Ear Bud Update Breaking News! Based on all the feedback on my complaints about the slippery ear buds that came with my iPod Shuffle, I googled for the suggested Sony brand, and quickly found the Sony MDR-EX81LP buds at Amazon for $32 clams. And in white cables to match the pod. But what an even nicer surprise when […] ➡
- Moving the House (and hoping none of the occupants notice) Today was time to knuckle down and get some work done. I am about 80% done moving an entire nested web site with connected database to a new server (this is going from a Linux running on a PC platform to our enterprise web server), and trying to get all the walls, roofs, and floors […] ➡
- iWant iPod Flea Not yet available in any stores! iPod Flea commercial I’m working now in a FleaCast. (Another fine Kotke remaidered link) Share this barking on social media ➡
// 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.
