“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 8 posts previously published on September 4th
- 2025
- Oh Canada (I am) I had a very important zoom meeting in the schedule on Wednesday that I definitely did not want to miss. I was dressed, breakfasted, and logged in early, ready with the scissors I was told to bring. This was the day I took the oath, along with 90 others in the call, as a new […]
- 2018
- 2017
- To Serve The World Why do we always fall for the Kanamits? Respectfully submitted for your perusal, an animated GIF. Frames: seven. File size: in the neighborhood of only 860k. Origin: my wacky idea over breakfast. Motives? Therein hangs the tale, for in just a moment, we’re going to ask you to shake hands, figuratively, with a self-absorbed Christopher […]
- Big Picture for WordPress, a Newly Hatched Calling Card Theme I’ve taken a second stab at converting the elegant, Creative Commons licensed static HTML themes from HTML5 UP and baking it into a WordPress calling card theme. The first one I did was based on the Dimension theme, and got a nice tweet from Dan who just put it to use Holy crap! I have […]
- 2012
- Gotta Know When To Walk This is supposed to be an introductory blog post for the Program for Online Teaching Certificate Class. Hello/Goodbye it is– while it’s a bit early to jump over the fence (I did rad the first chapter of the book), but I am finding it’s not the experience I need. I’m on course in my usual […]
- Nice Doggy This is the second week of bootcamp for our online ds106 classes at University of Mary Washington; and one of the assignments this week is a challenge. We asked out students to create an animated GIF in response to the Say it Like Peanut Butter assignment— and purposely did not provide explicit instructions. What we […]
- 2009
- See Media Flow It seems as easy as Spot. I was playing around with blip.fm and had the eye brow arching experience of seeing media jump around the net. I see people blip in twitter, and I made an account a while ago, but barely dip in. It’s more or less like being your own DJ in a […]
- 2008
- Finding a .flac Tool, Ducks Optional I always knew some day I’d have a reason to blog about something I could relate to the insurance duck (don’t seek an answer why). In my travels last week, a friend I stayed with shared some (well a lot) of concert audio files, all in .flac format– which I had maybe heard of before, […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 8 posts previously published on September 4th
- 2025
- Oh Canada (I am) I had a very important zoom meeting in the schedule on Wednesday that I definitely did not want to miss. I was dressed, breakfasted, and logged in early, ready with the scissors I was told to bring. This was the day I took the oath, along with 90 others in the call, as a new […] ➡
- 2018
- 2017
- To Serve The World Why do we always fall for the Kanamits? Respectfully submitted for your perusal, an animated GIF. Frames: seven. File size: in the neighborhood of only 860k. Origin: my wacky idea over breakfast. Motives? Therein hangs the tale, for in just a moment, we’re going to ask you to shake hands, figuratively, with a self-absorbed Christopher […] ➡
- Big Picture for WordPress, a Newly Hatched Calling Card Theme I’ve taken a second stab at converting the elegant, Creative Commons licensed static HTML themes from HTML5 UP and baking it into a WordPress calling card theme. The first one I did was based on the Dimension theme, and got a nice tweet from Dan who just put it to use Holy crap! I have […] ➡
- 2012
- Gotta Know When To Walk This is supposed to be an introductory blog post for the Program for Online Teaching Certificate Class. Hello/Goodbye it is– while it’s a bit early to jump over the fence (I did rad the first chapter of the book), but I am finding it’s not the experience I need. I’m on course in my usual […] ➡
- Nice Doggy This is the second week of bootcamp for our online ds106 classes at University of Mary Washington; and one of the assignments this week is a challenge. We asked out students to create an animated GIF in response to the Say it Like Peanut Butter assignment— and purposely did not provide explicit instructions. What we […] ➡
- 2009
- See Media Flow It seems as easy as Spot. I was playing around with blip.fm and had the eye brow arching experience of seeing media jump around the net. I see people blip in twitter, and I made an account a while ago, but barely dip in. It’s more or less like being your own DJ in a […] ➡
- 2008
- Finding a .flac Tool, Ducks Optional I always knew some day I’d have a reason to blog about something I could relate to the insurance duck (don’t seek an answer why). In my travels last week, a friend I stayed with shared some (well a lot) of concert audio files, all in .flac format– which I had maybe heard of before, […] ➡
// 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.
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