“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 14 posts previously published on April 17th
- 2025
- Ignore. A Launch Over the ActivityPub Test Range Indeed, this post is a test. With the move of this olde barge of a blog from Reclaim Hosting’s shared hosting to Reclaim Cloud, the WordPress Activity Pub seems not to by firing out via @barking in Mastodon. On the publishing side, I see the WordPress wheels spinning in the process, but it never completes. […]
- 2024
- the pulse of net.art It’s no surprise that Jay Hoffman writing about The Analog Web caught my eye, not for nostalgia, but something that circles forward. I’ve been following Jays History of the Web writing since, well I can’t remember when, and am pleased to see he has gotten federated. Of many points I could grab as a Gardner […]
- 2022
- A Random Voice Reader/Mixer now with Docs! My speed of blogging is one of those limit curves approaching a large stretch of time. But hey, no one really notices but me. I thought I had not even written up this first fun tool I made, to make it possible to generate a random mixture of different voices, reading the same text, done […]
- 2017
- The Pursuit of Contextless Media Could this be another harbinger of a post (first time ever using that word) on the dearth of image attribution? Heck yes. But not because of the lack of giving credit where it ought to be, more so because with with context-less shared media the cut off at the knees of curiosity of learning anything […]
- 2016
- Solutionism by Experts, Polarized Viewpoints… It’s Dog Training So you think education is plagued by solutionism, evangelizing experts, and extreme viewpoints that make people choose camps– it’s nothing compared to the world of information about… dog training. Talk about voracious blog commenting and virtual rock tossing! My new sweet dog Felix has one major problem- he does not like being left alone. This […]
- 2014
- I am the New Flickr. I am an Ass. modidied from creative commons licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by El Bibliomata The new flickr is an ass. I got over its ass way of “””supporting””” with creative commons (triple scare quotes, flickr’s implementation is anything but an implementation). But this dog can find the ways around asses. I am not all that […]
- Enquire Within Upon Everything: True Stories of the Wondrous Web Yesterday I had fun with a keynote presentation for the eLearning Consortium of Colorado 2014 Conference. This was the 25th annual conference for this rather impressive, under-the-radar collaborative organization, that has been networking and sharing for 25 years. You can find all the presentation resources at http://cogdog.wikispaces.com/Enquire+Within+eLCC+2014 Enquire Within Upon Everything: True Stories of the […]
- 2013
- A Day Without Hearing About MOOCs is… This is for @pumpkiny, trapped in an edupreneur conference full of MOOC hustlers… I could go for that, so who is going to be the 2000-teens version of Anita Bryant? “He’s not a talking bird, he’s a thinking bird. He thinks MOOC” Sorry, MOOC mocking helps me stay sane. Share this barking on social media
- 2010
- I Am An Agent I finally passed my certification, confirmed after a rigid test of endurance at the Sportsman’s Chalet in Strawberry Arizona (branch offices at Falconetti’s in East Vancouver) created under the influence at Disinformation’s Generator Share this barking on social media
- Power of Paper Prototyping I got a nice memory pingback when reading a the recent update from Evernote — later below I’ll go back to my experience trying this, but they were describing their approach about designing a new version of their app for the iPad (THIS IS NOT A POST ABOUT iPADS. THIS IS NOT A POST ABOUT […]
- 2009
- My Docs Can Speak – Free Text to Speech from Zamzar Zamzar is a very powerful striped cone-headed frog…. Actually Zamzar is a very handy, web-base, free tool for converting files – different types of graphics, audio or document files (dealing with those infernal Microsoft Office *.docx or *.pptx file types). You upload a file, and Zamzar the Wonder Converter emails you later with a link […]
- 2008
- Sometimes One Stellar Session Can Rescue a Conference Experience While my enthusiasm for the eLearning confernce I am at may be low, largely due to my own self applied over commitment and trying to work on 8 other things while on the road… it is amazingly re-assuring that one great session can make up for all the rest. Such was the case with this […]
- 2005
- YaGoohoo!gle Yahoo Google Side by Side Shoot Out Who is better? Yahoo or Google? How do they compare for specific searches? YaGoohoo!gle, which apparently started out as an April Fool’s joke. is now more than a joke. Via a simple, familiar search form, this site will produce a side by side search result from the big two engines. The author’s blog offers some […]
- Dog Rap: HTTP in tha House More frivolity (blog tip of the hat to Kottke) for HTTP in tha House. You submit a URL, and the web site extracts the text, combines them into 16 lines, uses a rhyming dictionary, and pops out a series of random rap-like lyrics. Real word use? minimal. Fun and randomness? priceless. Here is the new […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 14 posts previously published on April 17th
- 2025
- Ignore. A Launch Over the ActivityPub Test Range Indeed, this post is a test. With the move of this olde barge of a blog from Reclaim Hosting’s shared hosting to Reclaim Cloud, the WordPress Activity Pub seems not to by firing out via @barking in Mastodon. On the publishing side, I see the WordPress wheels spinning in the process, but it never completes. […] ➡
- 2024
- the pulse of net.art It’s no surprise that Jay Hoffman writing about The Analog Web caught my eye, not for nostalgia, but something that circles forward. I’ve been following Jays History of the Web writing since, well I can’t remember when, and am pleased to see he has gotten federated. Of many points I could grab as a Gardner […] ➡
- 2022
- A Random Voice Reader/Mixer now with Docs! My speed of blogging is one of those limit curves approaching a large stretch of time. But hey, no one really notices but me. I thought I had not even written up this first fun tool I made, to make it possible to generate a random mixture of different voices, reading the same text, done […] ➡
- 2017
- The Pursuit of Contextless Media Could this be another harbinger of a post (first time ever using that word) on the dearth of image attribution? Heck yes. But not because of the lack of giving credit where it ought to be, more so because with with context-less shared media the cut off at the knees of curiosity of learning anything […] ➡
- 2016
- Solutionism by Experts, Polarized Viewpoints… It’s Dog Training So you think education is plagued by solutionism, evangelizing experts, and extreme viewpoints that make people choose camps– it’s nothing compared to the world of information about… dog training. Talk about voracious blog commenting and virtual rock tossing! My new sweet dog Felix has one major problem- he does not like being left alone. This […] ➡
- 2014
- I am the New Flickr. I am an Ass. modidied from creative commons licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by El Bibliomata The new flickr is an ass. I got over its ass way of “””supporting””” with creative commons (triple scare quotes, flickr’s implementation is anything but an implementation). But this dog can find the ways around asses. I am not all that […] ➡
- Enquire Within Upon Everything: True Stories of the Wondrous Web Yesterday I had fun with a keynote presentation for the eLearning Consortium of Colorado 2014 Conference. This was the 25th annual conference for this rather impressive, under-the-radar collaborative organization, that has been networking and sharing for 25 years. You can find all the presentation resources at http://cogdog.wikispaces.com/Enquire+Within+eLCC+2014 Enquire Within Upon Everything: True Stories of the […] ➡
- 2013
- A Day Without Hearing About MOOCs is… This is for @pumpkiny, trapped in an edupreneur conference full of MOOC hustlers… I could go for that, so who is going to be the 2000-teens version of Anita Bryant? “He’s not a talking bird, he’s a thinking bird. He thinks MOOC” Sorry, MOOC mocking helps me stay sane. Share this barking on social media ➡
- 2010
- I Am An Agent I finally passed my certification, confirmed after a rigid test of endurance at the Sportsman’s Chalet in Strawberry Arizona (branch offices at Falconetti’s in East Vancouver) created under the influence at Disinformation’s Generator Share this barking on social media ➡
- Power of Paper Prototyping I got a nice memory pingback when reading a the recent update from Evernote — later below I’ll go back to my experience trying this, but they were describing their approach about designing a new version of their app for the iPad (THIS IS NOT A POST ABOUT iPADS. THIS IS NOT A POST ABOUT […] ➡
- 2009
- My Docs Can Speak – Free Text to Speech from Zamzar Zamzar is a very powerful striped cone-headed frog…. Actually Zamzar is a very handy, web-base, free tool for converting files – different types of graphics, audio or document files (dealing with those infernal Microsoft Office *.docx or *.pptx file types). You upload a file, and Zamzar the Wonder Converter emails you later with a link […] ➡
- 2008
- 2005
- YaGoohoo!gle Yahoo Google Side by Side Shoot Out Who is better? Yahoo or Google? How do they compare for specific searches? YaGoohoo!gle, which apparently started out as an April Fool’s joke. is now more than a joke. Via a simple, familiar search form, this site will produce a side by side search result from the big two engines. The author’s blog offers some […] ➡
- Dog Rap: HTTP in tha House More frivolity (blog tip of the hat to Kottke) for HTTP in tha House. You submit a URL, and the web site extracts the text, combines them into 16 lines, uses a rhyming dictionary, and pops out a series of random rap-like lyrics. Real word use? minimal. Fun and randomness? priceless. Here is the new […] ➡
// 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.
