“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 June 30th
- 2025
- Gettin’ Air Strummed Badly I calculate multiple years have passed since I recorded an EdTech Cover Song where I lamely rewrote lyrics, munged some chords, to be dumb enough to post online my bad talent. But I love the act of rewriting lyrics, all on my own, no LLMs in the mix. Just to get the cringing out of […]
- That’s The Way the Dog Treats Bounce This was just another one of those stories where someone made use of one of my public domain flickr photos shared under CC0. If you follow the typical convention as taught in those woekshops, this means you can use an image, and not even need to give credit. Just grab and go. But that’s what […]
- 2017
- Seeking Ideas on [Open] Research Networked Seminar #resnetsem Here I share an idea for a Fall course that has almost no substance yet, but at least it has a hashtag 😉 This is all a direct consequence of the collaboration between me and Mia Zamora in running the open Networked Narratives course at Kean University where I co-taught and got to know brilliant […]
- 2016
- We Want YOU to Make a What If CC Certificate Video Yes, you. That’s who I am talking too. I put out this idea a few weeks ago asking people to do an imagination exercise to tell us first what place a Creative Commons Certification might have for them, and how they might envision such a thing working. To me, it’s an interesting approach in this […]
- 2015
- In Which I Resign From a Brief Stint as an Attribution Cop Promoting and building tools for attribution of media may be one of the longest hobby horses running around this blog. I never got linktribution nor thanktribution to catch on. To me much of the problem with the way media reuse, copyright is taught is based on fear-if you use a copyrighted image, you will get […]
- 2013
- Redecorating the ds106 Radio Site This is part 1 of hopefully two posts about ds106 radio, the open microphone internet radio station spawned for ds106 (in case you do not know {how could you not} its the Open Digital Storytelling course) in January 2011. The next post will be some info on how to program the radio shows. But I […]
- 2011
- Postcards Cousin Bobby Style Holy retro, Batman! I am sending analog postcards! Those things with short, hand written, possibly tweet-length sentiments (sans hashtags) with a real photo attached, not a twitpic link. Doing this while traveling took me back in time to growing up and getting postcards from Cousin Bobby. I was not (and still not) clear on whose […]
- Road Stats cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of days on the road: 7 Miles Driven: 953 Number of States driven in: 3 Money Spent on gas: $228.11 Photos posted: 220 Money Spent on Hotels: $0 ($15 for camping does not count) Friend Homes Visited: 3 Number of new dogs met: 9 […]
- 2006
- Calendar Data PITA and Banging On WordPress Remember the “S” in RSS standing for Simple? I’ve gone through several gyrations [1] [2] [3] in trying to leverage RSS-ified calendar data to push content to a blog. Calendar information is just not as neatly boxed like Title, Link, & Description. What I wanted is a web-based calendar tool (lots of them), that I […]
- Intersection of RL & SL: Posters on NMC Campus flickr foto Poster Presenteravailable on flickr Come meet me on July 12, 2006 to talk about our large format printing project at Hamilton College Like the conference session converged with a Second Life presence we ran at the NMC 2006 Conference in Cleveland, we are again playing with that intersection of real and virtual. We […]
- 2005
- 2004
- The Blog Blinks On (and Off).. Catch Up on OpenMLX The dog has not died, but the author has been offline following the NMC 2004 Summer conference in Vancouver, taking advantage of the launch point for some relaxing travel to Vancouver Island and the tremendous Rocky Mountains south of Jasper, Alberta. It is just a short stopover in Phoenix to change clothes, repack for a […]
- 2003
- Weekly Google +/- Feedster The highly touted (well maybe in my mind) right side feature of the CDB site, Google of the Week is actually a poor person’s RSS feed, probably one of the easiest ways to syndicate content is to link to a search that produces a customized query result. This week, just to highlight the silliness of […]
On Michael’s site he might use There are 13 posts previously published on June 30th
- 2025
- Gettin’ Air Strummed Badly I calculate multiple years have passed since I recorded an EdTech Cover Song where I lamely rewrote lyrics, munged some chords, to be dumb enough to post online my bad talent. But I love the act of rewriting lyrics, all on my own, no LLMs in the mix. Just to get the cringing out of […] ➡
- That’s The Way the Dog Treats Bounce This was just another one of those stories where someone made use of one of my public domain flickr photos shared under CC0. If you follow the typical convention as taught in those woekshops, this means you can use an image, and not even need to give credit. Just grab and go. But that’s what […] ➡
- 2017
- Seeking Ideas on [Open] Research Networked Seminar #resnetsem Here I share an idea for a Fall course that has almost no substance yet, but at least it has a hashtag 😉 This is all a direct consequence of the collaboration between me and Mia Zamora in running the open Networked Narratives course at Kean University where I co-taught and got to know brilliant […] ➡
- 2016
- We Want YOU to Make a What If CC Certificate Video Yes, you. That’s who I am talking too. I put out this idea a few weeks ago asking people to do an imagination exercise to tell us first what place a Creative Commons Certification might have for them, and how they might envision such a thing working. To me, it’s an interesting approach in this […] ➡
- 2015
- In Which I Resign From a Brief Stint as an Attribution Cop Promoting and building tools for attribution of media may be one of the longest hobby horses running around this blog. I never got linktribution nor thanktribution to catch on. To me much of the problem with the way media reuse, copyright is taught is based on fear-if you use a copyrighted image, you will get […] ➡
- 2013
- Redecorating the ds106 Radio Site This is part 1 of hopefully two posts about ds106 radio, the open microphone internet radio station spawned for ds106 (in case you do not know {how could you not} its the Open Digital Storytelling course) in January 2011. The next post will be some info on how to program the radio shows. But I […] ➡
- 2011
- Postcards Cousin Bobby Style Holy retro, Batman! I am sending analog postcards! Those things with short, hand written, possibly tweet-length sentiments (sans hashtags) with a real photo attached, not a twitpic link. Doing this while traveling took me back in time to growing up and getting postcards from Cousin Bobby. I was not (and still not) clear on whose […] ➡
- Road Stats cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of days on the road: 7 Miles Driven: 953 Number of States driven in: 3 Money Spent on gas: $228.11 Photos posted: 220 Money Spent on Hotels: $0 ($15 for camping does not count) Friend Homes Visited: 3 Number of new dogs met: 9 […] ➡
- 2006
- Calendar Data PITA and Banging On WordPress Remember the “S” in RSS standing for Simple? I’ve gone through several gyrations [1] [2] [3] in trying to leverage RSS-ified calendar data to push content to a blog. Calendar information is just not as neatly boxed like Title, Link, & Description. What I wanted is a web-based calendar tool (lots of them), that I […] ➡
- Intersection of RL & SL: Posters on NMC Campus flickr foto Poster Presenteravailable on flickr Come meet me on July 12, 2006 to talk about our large format printing project at Hamilton College Like the conference session converged with a Second Life presence we ran at the NMC 2006 Conference in Cleveland, we are again playing with that intersection of real and virtual. We […] ➡
- 2005
- 2004
- The Blog Blinks On (and Off).. Catch Up on OpenMLX The dog has not died, but the author has been offline following the NMC 2004 Summer conference in Vancouver, taking advantage of the launch point for some relaxing travel to Vancouver Island and the tremendous Rocky Mountains south of Jasper, Alberta. It is just a short stopover in Phoenix to change clothes, repack for a […] ➡
- 2003
- Weekly Google +/- Feedster The highly touted (well maybe in my mind) right side feature of the CDB site, Google of the Week is actually a poor person’s RSS feed, probably one of the easiest ways to syndicate content is to link to a search that produces a customized query result. This week, just to highlight the silliness of […] ➡
// 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.
