“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 21 posts previously published on July 22nd
- 2025
- Telecaster Time Redux I believe the old saying is true – “[Blogging] insanity is writing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” like maybe someone actually reading it (?). But heck, I’m not in this for the clicks, it’s my blog, and I’ll retell it if I want to. It’s about a guitar I […]
- 2023
- Down the Web Rabbit Holes: Memories of Enchanted Forest to Foamhenge and Back Here we go. Again. That old web magic is still there, the stuff I lump as web serendipity, what happens when unexpectedly, something tickles the curiosity, it leads to something else, lather, rinse, repeat. It’s my variety of Vannevar Bush’s associative trails, what I like to play with the title “As We May Link”, especially […]
- 2016
- Write This Guest Post, Chelsey Chelsey is making me an incredible offer, I just got her email: Hi, my name is Chelsey and I am a content-manager. If you are interested I would love to write a post for your website that I think your audience would really love. Really, you talked to all three of my readers? Tell me […]
- What Part to Play? Thanks again to Bryan Mathers for generating this response to the question “What part do you play?” What part do you play?…Part of a @visualthinkery conversation with @cogdog about @creativecommons #oer #edchat pic.twitter.com/l1UshqLzTY — Bryan Mathers (@BryanMMathers) July 22, 2016 We hope to help convert fools to creators, ninjas, and defenders. Creative Commons licensed (CC-BY-ND) […]
- Resetting the Tables with More Awesome Perhaps it will never be used and / or no one really needs to know this technical minutiae, but I’m documenting as much as possible the work that will lead up to this Creative Commons Certificate. Yesterday I wrote up a bit of this duct taped system to collect via a Google Form resources as […]
- 2014
- Taking the Hunt for OER Reuse to the Waters creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-SA ) flickr photo shared by Lope® Having stomped around the forest for almost a week and finding no stories of OER Reuse but whispers and a few broken limbs, I am going to aim my search at the waters. The photos ore just as blurry and the doubters and skeptics […]
- It’s Not Amazing When the Web Forgets You In prepping my recent call for OER Reuse Stories (which, ahem, I have collected a grand total of ZERO new ones) I was reviewing the original ones I collected the first time I did an Amazing Stories talk on 2009. By the way, that site still works despite using a defunct CoolIris embed. In going […]
- 2013
- ds106 Daily Create Challenge (21) : Pals cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Today’s Daily Create was a photography challenge: Make a photo of what friendship mean to you. Simple. We don;t let other weirdos try to define kinds of friendship, friendship is what it is. I was not even thinking of TDC when I took […]
- 2011
- Mysterious Sherman Lake cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog As I drive around the country, I spend a lot of time behind the wheel trying to make guesses at what is worth stopping to see. I cannot pick everything, else I would not get anywhere, and there is a certain amount of blind luck […]
- Road Stats Week 4 cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of days on the road: 28 Miles Driven: 3300 Number of States driven in: 6 Money spent on gas: $594.70 Photos posted: 731 (that is an average of 26 per day) ds106 Mile marker Photos: 2 (Idaho and Washington) Number of nights in hotels: […]
- 2010
- Pluto Gets No Respect After a bunch of lead weight code riddled posts, let’s lighten it up. I can always count on GraphJam for some laughs, but also for the clever ways people find to represent ideas, thoughts, jokes, in graph form. Yes, when I was a kid, Pluto was a planet, but scientists have kicked the cold rock […]
- Pinning WordPress 3 Custom Content to the Map (b) cc licensed flickr photo shared by QualityFrog In a previous long winding post, Dressing up and Displaying WordPress 3 Custom Post Content (a), I tried to document the first part of my WordPress 3 site I manipulated the new Custom Content types. It seems it takes longer to explain that to build, and in the […]
- 2009
- DLSR Video We today here in downtown Strawberry Arizona, as Mary McCann a DJ known as Bone Mama used to say, an outbreak of weather. It crashed just as I was about to enjoy a fine lunch of peanut butter and jelly, and it occurred to me this would be something worth trying to video with the […]
- WTG? What the Google is Going On? I admit it. I still regularly review content RSS feeds in that archaic, pre-twitter-is-all-i-need thing called a “Feed Reader”. Me and 3 other holdouts. Go ahead, call me a throw back. Recently, in using Google Reader, I am seeing signs that the Great Google is subtly slipping in more social network features, that have me […]
- 2008
- The Last PowerPoint (well maybe mine) Hah! I bet I fooled you into thinking this was another rant against evil PowerPoint, eh? Nope, I actually just used it. Here is another series of loosely connected events I try to frame as a “story”. I had seen, perhaps tweeted. that Slideshare (‘the YouTube of PowerPoints) was running a World’s Best Presentation contest. […]
- Exploding Heads The rush of new technologies is not quite so different from this image, appropriately titled Armageddon. Among my cloud or network, are colleagues wiping out and restarting their social networks, jumping away from twitter to avoid mcirothinking or just hating twitter, or just pulling in the reigns from every possible social network tossed at them. […]
- 2007
- Blogalytics I had completely forgotten that I’ve had the bits installed on this blog to capture data in Google Analytics, which for the paranoid means your browsing habits are feeding the big G machine (not the purpose of today’s meanderings). In fact, I doubt I had looked at the reports at all, but they do contain […]
- Hey Eduardo! My wife was at a dinner recently– she ran nto an old friend and colleague we’d not heard from in a while. Eduardo mentioned “but I read Alan’s blog all the time…”, so Eduardo, this blog post is for you to see if you are there- send me an email and our next lunch meet […]
- 2004
- Survived In regards to the yesterday’s bike accomplishment, make that two in a row. Today was uneventful, the only encounters were with a covey of quail along the Arizona Canal. When we bicycle, we are all Lance, careening down the cobblestone roads at 50 mph, accelerating our way up the French Alps, arms raised in yellow […]
- 2003
- Bag Dropping Bookmarklet Regarding our post about a new RSS feed for the web’s eye view bag of urls site, Scott Leslie commented about our submission form being an ideal candidate for a web browser bookmarklet tool. Scott has recently championed these underused tools for one’s browser toolbar, rightfully so, because they are very handy, bordering on indispensible. […]
- How Many Grains of Sand on a Beach? (Counting Blogs) Deep philosophical questions or trivial trivia? “How many stars are there in the sky?” “How many grains of sand on the beach?” The question of How many blogs and bloggers? How big the blogosphere? from blogcount yields an estimated 2.4 to 2.9 weblogs as of Monday, June 23, based on reports of the big centrally […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 21 posts previously published on July 22nd
- 2025
- Telecaster Time Redux I believe the old saying is true – “[Blogging] insanity is writing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” like maybe someone actually reading it (?). But heck, I’m not in this for the clicks, it’s my blog, and I’ll retell it if I want to. It’s about a guitar I […] ➡
- 2023
- 2016
- Write This Guest Post, Chelsey Chelsey is making me an incredible offer, I just got her email: Hi, my name is Chelsey and I am a content-manager. If you are interested I would love to write a post for your website that I think your audience would really love. Really, you talked to all three of my readers? Tell me […] ➡
- What Part to Play? Thanks again to Bryan Mathers for generating this response to the question “What part do you play?” What part do you play?…Part of a @visualthinkery conversation with @cogdog about @creativecommons #oer #edchat pic.twitter.com/l1UshqLzTY — Bryan Mathers (@BryanMMathers) July 22, 2016 We hope to help convert fools to creators, ninjas, and defenders. Creative Commons licensed (CC-BY-ND) […] ➡
- Resetting the Tables with More Awesome Perhaps it will never be used and / or no one really needs to know this technical minutiae, but I’m documenting as much as possible the work that will lead up to this Creative Commons Certificate. Yesterday I wrote up a bit of this duct taped system to collect via a Google Form resources as […] ➡
- 2014
- Taking the Hunt for OER Reuse to the Waters creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-SA ) flickr photo shared by Lope® Having stomped around the forest for almost a week and finding no stories of OER Reuse but whispers and a few broken limbs, I am going to aim my search at the waters. The photos ore just as blurry and the doubters and skeptics […] ➡
- It’s Not Amazing When the Web Forgets You In prepping my recent call for OER Reuse Stories (which, ahem, I have collected a grand total of ZERO new ones) I was reviewing the original ones I collected the first time I did an Amazing Stories talk on 2009. By the way, that site still works despite using a defunct CoolIris embed. In going […] ➡
- 2013
- ds106 Daily Create Challenge (21) : Pals cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Today’s Daily Create was a photography challenge: Make a photo of what friendship mean to you. Simple. We don;t let other weirdos try to define kinds of friendship, friendship is what it is. I was not even thinking of TDC when I took […] ➡
- 2011
- Mysterious Sherman Lake cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog As I drive around the country, I spend a lot of time behind the wheel trying to make guesses at what is worth stopping to see. I cannot pick everything, else I would not get anywhere, and there is a certain amount of blind luck […] ➡
- Road Stats Week 4 cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of days on the road: 28 Miles Driven: 3300 Number of States driven in: 6 Money spent on gas: $594.70 Photos posted: 731 (that is an average of 26 per day) ds106 Mile marker Photos: 2 (Idaho and Washington) Number of nights in hotels: […] ➡
- 2010
- Pluto Gets No Respect After a bunch of lead weight code riddled posts, let’s lighten it up. I can always count on GraphJam for some laughs, but also for the clever ways people find to represent ideas, thoughts, jokes, in graph form. Yes, when I was a kid, Pluto was a planet, but scientists have kicked the cold rock […] ➡
- Pinning WordPress 3 Custom Content to the Map (b) cc licensed flickr photo shared by QualityFrog In a previous long winding post, Dressing up and Displaying WordPress 3 Custom Post Content (a), I tried to document the first part of my WordPress 3 site I manipulated the new Custom Content types. It seems it takes longer to explain that to build, and in the […] ➡
- 2009
- DLSR Video We today here in downtown Strawberry Arizona, as Mary McCann a DJ known as Bone Mama used to say, an outbreak of weather. It crashed just as I was about to enjoy a fine lunch of peanut butter and jelly, and it occurred to me this would be something worth trying to video with the […] ➡
- WTG? What the Google is Going On? I admit it. I still regularly review content RSS feeds in that archaic, pre-twitter-is-all-i-need thing called a “Feed Reader”. Me and 3 other holdouts. Go ahead, call me a throw back. Recently, in using Google Reader, I am seeing signs that the Great Google is subtly slipping in more social network features, that have me […] ➡
- 2008
- The Last PowerPoint (well maybe mine) Hah! I bet I fooled you into thinking this was another rant against evil PowerPoint, eh? Nope, I actually just used it. Here is another series of loosely connected events I try to frame as a “story”. I had seen, perhaps tweeted. that Slideshare (‘the YouTube of PowerPoints) was running a World’s Best Presentation contest. […] ➡
- Exploding Heads The rush of new technologies is not quite so different from this image, appropriately titled Armageddon. Among my cloud or network, are colleagues wiping out and restarting their social networks, jumping away from twitter to avoid mcirothinking or just hating twitter, or just pulling in the reigns from every possible social network tossed at them. […] ➡
- 2007
- Blogalytics I had completely forgotten that I’ve had the bits installed on this blog to capture data in Google Analytics, which for the paranoid means your browsing habits are feeding the big G machine (not the purpose of today’s meanderings). In fact, I doubt I had looked at the reports at all, but they do contain […] ➡
- Hey Eduardo! My wife was at a dinner recently– she ran nto an old friend and colleague we’d not heard from in a while. Eduardo mentioned “but I read Alan’s blog all the time…”, so Eduardo, this blog post is for you to see if you are there- send me an email and our next lunch meet […] ➡
- 2004
- Survived In regards to the yesterday’s bike accomplishment, make that two in a row. Today was uneventful, the only encounters were with a covey of quail along the Arizona Canal. When we bicycle, we are all Lance, careening down the cobblestone roads at 50 mph, accelerating our way up the French Alps, arms raised in yellow […] ➡
- 2003
- Bag Dropping Bookmarklet Regarding our post about a new RSS feed for the web’s eye view bag of urls site, Scott Leslie commented about our submission form being an ideal candidate for a web browser bookmarklet tool. Scott has recently championed these underused tools for one’s browser toolbar, rightfully so, because they are very handy, bordering on indispensible. […] ➡
- How Many Grains of Sand on a Beach? (Counting Blogs) Deep philosophical questions or trivial trivia? “How many stars are there in the sky?” “How many grains of sand on the beach?” The question of How many blogs and bloggers? How big the blogosphere? from blogcount yields an estimated 2.4 to 2.9 weblogs as of Monday, June 23, based on reports of the big centrally […] ➡
// 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.
