“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 13 posts previously published on October 1st
- 2025
- Right on Time, Nine (months of daily photos) September brings the season of change, and after almost missing the cut for August and July calling for last day uploads, the Daily Photo habit changed back to getting it done. Well that’s because a week or so ago I caught up on the backlog. Yes, no one I am sure gives one hoot or […]
- 2020
- Nifty Trick for Extracting Text Out of Images Images of text are not useful when all you can do is look at them. How can you get text out of something like this if you need a chunk of it to put to use? Go ahead, put your cursor there and try to grab a chunk. I have a current project where a […]
- 2019
- There Goes the Map: WordPressing of the CorrLeader Site This is the third of n in a series of posts covering the development of a web site project for JIBC. Previously I wrote about the metaphor of and prototyping of a map metaphor. Now it’s how it was not exactly realized in the WordPress site created. But let’s start with the end, meet CorrLeader, […]
- 2016
- Blocked in Belarus (and 242 other countries) My apologies to all the people of “some” countries: Afghanistan, Aland Islands, Albania, Algeria, American Samoa, Andorra, Angola, Anguilla, Antarctica, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Aruba, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Bermuda, Bhutan, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Bouvet Island, Brazil, British Indian Ocean Territory, British Virgin Islands, Brunei, […]
- 2015
- Refining the Virtually Connecting Site The small project started by Maha Bali and Rebecca Hogue is growing as more people get involved with bridging educational conferences with people who cannot attend in person. We have an active Slack (funny words together), and plans in motion for at least 5 upcoming conferences. Heck, there might be a manifesto too. Woot! We […]
- Leg 1 of East Coast Tour: Not Quite as Planned (I cannot say in words a reason for the choice of the image above, it’s weird enough to fit). It’s just about 2 weeks into a 7 week barnstorming tour of various parts of USA, and… well it was not quite how I envisioned it. I’m in motion today by the train to Fredericksburg, VA, […]
- 2014
- Pulled Out of an RSS Rabbit Hole By a Hawksey Genius Card creative commons licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by xJason.Rogersx Does anyone set out to go down such a hole? It all started because Matt Rafalow contacted me- he was hoping to use medium.com to publish his work for Connected Courses. Simple, I thought. I knew medium publishes RSS feeds for user accounts. RSS […]
- 2013
- I Found a Camera in Popcorn This is my second of makes as a Mozilla Web Maker Fella, my first was the Thimble creating yourself as an ingredients lable. I actually was intending to do another idea in popcorn, and was just checking out an example Brett Gaylor shared to understand how you can embed a set from flickr. I was […]
- Morning Journeys- phonar pre-task I am not even finding enough time to do some creative work for ds106, so why not try a bit for our partner in anti-MOOCing, the open photography+narrative course at Coventry University — phonar. The pre-task ramp up for the course that starts n October is to document a morning journey- to class, work, whatever. […]
- 2012
- On Audio Storytelling with Bryan Alexander cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I’m fortunate to be visiting the Vermont mountain home (enclave) of Bryan Alexander author of what I call the bible for this class, The New Digital Storytelling. Besides taking walks in the woods, building rock walls, watching sci fi and The Wire with his family, […]
- 2009
- More Than Notes is Evernote I’ve been late to the game to jump for joy over Evernote, and I am just beginning to see it as being more than just a place to store bits of information. It pretty much can capture any kind of information, be it text, image, sound, document- store it in the cloud, and syncs it […]
- 2008
- Kids from Hiroshima Kids from Hiroshima by cogdogblog posted 1 Oct ’08, 10.04am MDT PST on flickr This cute group if school kids today asked me to help them practice their English while I was visiting Kinkakuji Temple in Kyoto. It went something like… "Excuse me! Excuse me" (little voices rang out). "Hello, My name is Miko" said […]
- 2004
- Blogging Blips on the Radar I’d say it is nothing new these days to highlight or discover a new use of weblogs… No wait a minute, it still is interesting to see what pops up on the blog-o-verse. I’ve been at it since April 2003 and have helped a few groups and individuals in our system get started including 3 […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 13 posts previously published on October 1st
- 2025
- Right on Time, Nine (months of daily photos) September brings the season of change, and after almost missing the cut for August and July calling for last day uploads, the Daily Photo habit changed back to getting it done. Well that’s because a week or so ago I caught up on the backlog. Yes, no one I am sure gives one hoot or […] ➡
- 2020
- Nifty Trick for Extracting Text Out of Images Images of text are not useful when all you can do is look at them. How can you get text out of something like this if you need a chunk of it to put to use? Go ahead, put your cursor there and try to grab a chunk. I have a current project where a […] ➡
- 2019
- There Goes the Map: WordPressing of the CorrLeader Site This is the third of n in a series of posts covering the development of a web site project for JIBC. Previously I wrote about the metaphor of and prototyping of a map metaphor. Now it’s how it was not exactly realized in the WordPress site created. But let’s start with the end, meet CorrLeader, […] ➡
- 2016
- Blocked in Belarus (and 242 other countries) My apologies to all the people of “some” countries: Afghanistan, Aland Islands, Albania, Algeria, American Samoa, Andorra, Angola, Anguilla, Antarctica, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Aruba, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Bermuda, Bhutan, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Bouvet Island, Brazil, British Indian Ocean Territory, British Virgin Islands, Brunei, […] ➡
- 2015
- Refining the Virtually Connecting Site The small project started by Maha Bali and Rebecca Hogue is growing as more people get involved with bridging educational conferences with people who cannot attend in person. We have an active Slack (funny words together), and plans in motion for at least 5 upcoming conferences. Heck, there might be a manifesto too. Woot! We […] ➡
- Leg 1 of East Coast Tour: Not Quite as Planned (I cannot say in words a reason for the choice of the image above, it’s weird enough to fit). It’s just about 2 weeks into a 7 week barnstorming tour of various parts of USA, and… well it was not quite how I envisioned it. I’m in motion today by the train to Fredericksburg, VA, […] ➡
- 2014
- Pulled Out of an RSS Rabbit Hole By a Hawksey Genius Card creative commons licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by xJason.Rogersx Does anyone set out to go down such a hole? It all started because Matt Rafalow contacted me- he was hoping to use medium.com to publish his work for Connected Courses. Simple, I thought. I knew medium publishes RSS feeds for user accounts. RSS […] ➡
- 2013
- I Found a Camera in Popcorn This is my second of makes as a Mozilla Web Maker Fella, my first was the Thimble creating yourself as an ingredients lable. I actually was intending to do another idea in popcorn, and was just checking out an example Brett Gaylor shared to understand how you can embed a set from flickr. I was […] ➡
- Morning Journeys- phonar pre-task I am not even finding enough time to do some creative work for ds106, so why not try a bit for our partner in anti-MOOCing, the open photography+narrative course at Coventry University — phonar. The pre-task ramp up for the course that starts n October is to document a morning journey- to class, work, whatever. […] ➡
- 2012
- On Audio Storytelling with Bryan Alexander cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I’m fortunate to be visiting the Vermont mountain home (enclave) of Bryan Alexander author of what I call the bible for this class, The New Digital Storytelling. Besides taking walks in the woods, building rock walls, watching sci fi and The Wire with his family, […] ➡
- 2009
- More Than Notes is Evernote I’ve been late to the game to jump for joy over Evernote, and I am just beginning to see it as being more than just a place to store bits of information. It pretty much can capture any kind of information, be it text, image, sound, document- store it in the cloud, and syncs it […] ➡
- 2008
- Kids from Hiroshima Kids from Hiroshima by cogdogblog posted 1 Oct ’08, 10.04am MDT PST on flickr This cute group if school kids today asked me to help them practice their English while I was visiting Kinkakuji Temple in Kyoto. It went something like… "Excuse me! Excuse me" (little voices rang out). "Hello, My name is Miko" said […] ➡
- 2004
- Blogging Blips on the Radar I’d say it is nothing new these days to highlight or discover a new use of weblogs… No wait a minute, it still is interesting to see what pops up on the blog-o-verse. I’ve been at it since April 2003 and have helped a few groups and individuals in our system get started including 3 […] ➡
// 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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