Ok to Cross the Streams When Code Fixing

“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

Thanks to my On This Day page (thanks to @cogdog for that), I found my review of 2006: https://t.co/bsjJWahYlG (https://t.co/GQky8Cpz10)
— john johnston (@johnjohnston) December 29, 2019

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.

Red arrow points to missing number where the page output reads "There are posts previously published on December 29th"

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.

https://twitter.com/djwudi/status/1212871226953101313

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 18 posts previously published on February 25th

2025Unmuzzled: Let The Barking Begin The week of muzzling the blog to spend time commenting on other blogs is over. Did anyone notice? I’m not sure I did. No suggestions for more blogs to read came in, but I had a good enough supply from my RSS feeds spotting posts in Mastodon and plucking a few from the Reclaim Hosting […]
2024Overdue yet timely: A Ukrainian Circle “Holy late to the blog writing, Levine” yells the inner critic. Whatever. Here is my tale of a circle I was most fortunate to have been swept into. And more critical whinging as I am actually a day later than I should have been. So it goes. And the title was supposed to have this […]
2020An Old, Simple Machine Fixed Y’all may be fine with dead links and broken sites, but if they belong to me, I am bothered. I was dusting off some portfolio items, and noticed one small, tiny project, maybe not even used anymore, was… busted. Blank screen. Maybe four or five years ago, my friend and colleague Michael Kelly asked if […]
2019The Slimy Sideshow of Public Domain Among a list of topics in our field that I am least interested in is the seemingly endless bickering about one Creative Commons license versus another. It’s more that the details of licenses always seems to cast the largest area of attention in talking about open education sharing. After the array of licenses are tossed […]
2016And Now For Something Completely Positive Are you getting tired of my Facebook catfishing rants? Too bad, they won’t stop until I get some answers. But here, something that is in the good news category, via twitter. G5 Bulgarian language students learn how to use @cogdog's Flickr tool for Creative Commons citations at @AAS_Sofia pic.twitter.com/plrcvVOaZd — Shary Marshall (@sharymarshall) February 25, […]
2015A Two Dog Theme Demo Most of the time it’s intentional, but I do not always plan to use a dog metaphor. It just happens. In setting up the trubox multisite as a place for You Show participants to start their blogs, I came up […]
2014Life Sharing (2000-2003) In an era of privacy paranoia, government spying on its own citizens, identity theft as a familiar problem, the idea behind Life Sharing may be more radical today. Was this such a naive time? Maybe less titillating, Life Sharing creators Eva and Franco Mattes went far beyond the voyeuristic camera eye view into student Jennifer Ringely who launched JenniCam in 1996, posting regular still images every 3 seconds to the web, stopping in 2003. Revisiting the early net artâ€¦ where are they now? This is… Revisiting the early net art… where are they now? This is what I hope to do here. 35 web art sites from the 1990s and early 2000s- HTML, perl, flash, shockwave, wired plants, linux radio… from 0100101110101101.org to Jodi to RSG to Torolab, I will explore each site, or what remains of it, in a new post. more…
2013The Back End of the Donkey I’m bored of cows as a MOOCy metaphor; I found a new one: Isn’t he cute? The inspiration comes from a wise one — Neil Young — in The Donkey and Digital Music: The Full Dive Into Media Interview. Neil was on his stump, in grand ripping form, about how the digital music format that […]
2012Hosted By Hippies cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog With one final oooooooomph I have freed mysefl of web hosting/strangulation from Dreamhost, to the new free loving set up contrived by Tim Owens, http://hippiehosting.org– and experiment that is bearing fruit for a bunch of new possibilities of making domains of one’s own an even […]
2010Live Audio Streaming Second Life cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I’ve spent the past 3 days working behind the scenes for the NMC ;SL Pro! conference We had a lot of challenges with voice chat on day 1, so I fiddled a bit to see what I could do to provide a live audio stream. The trick with […]
2006WIth Enough Money To Purchase a Moderate Sized Country, You’d Think… More idle, internet-less ramblings while sitting on the plane… Anyhow, I’ve flipped through a bunch of magazines lately. One thing I like to do is look at the use of visuals in communicating a message, especially advertisements. Long long ago, when I taught a computer animation class (we were using Director 5.0 if that gives […] Less Than Half Full Podcasts In preparation for next week’s series of demos on podcasts, I’ve downloaded likely more than I have in the last 10 months. The sheer number of them is turning out to be more staggering than I thought. Content varies, production quality varies, all according to typical distribution curves. I am listening to a bunch flying […] Presentation Interruptus flickr foto Presentation Interruptusavailable on my flickr Here at the New Media Consortium (NMC) Directors meeting in Austin, I was doing a reprise of the 5 Minutes of Fame session at EDUCAUSE ELI Conference. This was supposedly highlighting the NMC Horizon Report section on "Phones in Their Pocket" — the report suggesting cell phone technology […]
2005I’ve been Skyped, Flossed A few weeks ago I was audio interviewed via Skype by Teemu Arina, a 1 hour plus session between me in Arizona and Teemu in Finland that was remarkably clear, had no dropouts. In an almost heroic effort, Teemu edited this to a pod/webcast, painstakingly removing my frequent “umms” as well as abstracting my free […] Wow! What a Portfolio-lific Day Just wrapping up from today’s event “ePortfolio Dialogue Day: Digital Stories of Deep Learning for Students and Faculty” with our excellent guest Helen Barrett, and it was a rousing success. Wish I could have been blogging it all, but other duties called. Helen gave an outstanding overview of the eportfolio landscape, and hammering the not […] SoFIA Releases First 8 Open Content Courses Sofia (Sharing of Free Intellectual Assets) intends to do for the community college level what MIT’s Open Courseware offers for upper division courses- free, open content courses you can use in whole or part. Free with Creative Commons licensing. The first 8 courses are available from their gallery: The pilot grant open content initiative, Sofia […]
2004Biff Cantrell / MLX Appearance at NMC Spring Online Conference Rumors are that elusive character, Biff Cantrell, will be appearing at the New Media Consortium Spring Online Conference (March 8-11, 2004). The NMC Series of Online Conferences is a new form of meetings based on social computing concepts and delivered entirely online through a collaboration with NMC partners iCohere and Macromedia. The unique environment allows […]

and the default value, the link at the end is invisible.

On Michael’s site he might use

There are 18 posts previously published on February 25th

2025Unmuzzled: Let The Barking Begin The week of muzzling the blog to spend time commenting on other blogs is over. Did anyone notice? I’m not sure I did. No suggestions for more blogs to read came in, but I had a good enough supply from my RSS feeds spotting posts in Mastodon and plucking a few from the Reclaim Hosting […] &amp#x27A1;
2024Overdue yet timely: A Ukrainian Circle “Holy late to the blog writing, Levine” yells the inner critic. Whatever. Here is my tale of a circle I was most fortunate to have been swept into. And more critical whinging as I am actually a day later than I should have been. So it goes. And the title was supposed to have this […] &amp#x27A1;
2020An Old, Simple Machine Fixed Y’all may be fine with dead links and broken sites, but if they belong to me, I am bothered. I was dusting off some portfolio items, and noticed one small, tiny project, maybe not even used anymore, was… busted. Blank screen. Maybe four or five years ago, my friend and colleague Michael Kelly asked if […] &amp#x27A1;
2019The Slimy Sideshow of Public Domain Among a list of topics in our field that I am least interested in is the seemingly endless bickering about one Creative Commons license versus another. It’s more that the details of licenses always seems to cast the largest area of attention in talking about open education sharing. After the array of licenses are tossed […] &amp#x27A1;
2016And Now For Something Completely Positive Are you getting tired of my Facebook catfishing rants? Too bad, they won’t stop until I get some answers. But here, something that is in the good news category, via twitter. G5 Bulgarian language students learn how to use @cogdog's Flickr tool for Creative Commons citations at @AAS_Sofia pic.twitter.com/plrcvVOaZd — Shary Marshall (@sharymarshall) February 25, […] &amp#x27A1;
2015A Two Dog Theme Demo Most of the time it’s intentional, but I do not always plan to use a dog metaphor. It just happens. In setting up the trubox multisite as a place for You Show participants to start their blogs, I came up […] &amp#x27A1;
2014Life Sharing (2000-2003) In an era of privacy paranoia, government spying on its own citizens, identity theft as a familiar problem, the idea behind Life Sharing may be more radical today. Was this such a naive time? Maybe less titillating, Life Sharing creators Eva and Franco Mattes went far beyond the voyeuristic camera eye view into student Jennifer Ringely who launched JenniCam in 1996, posting regular still images every 3 seconds to the web, stopping in 2003. &amp#x27A1; Revisiting the early net artâ€¦ where are they now? This is… Revisiting the early net art… where are they now? This is what I hope to do here. 35 web art sites from the 1990s and early 2000s- HTML, perl, flash, shockwave, wired plants, linux radio… from 0100101110101101.org to Jodi to RSG to Torolab, I will explore each site, or what remains of it, in a new post. more… &amp#x27A1;
2013The Back End of the Donkey I’m bored of cows as a MOOCy metaphor; I found a new one: Isn’t he cute? The inspiration comes from a wise one — Neil Young — in The Donkey and Digital Music: The Full Dive Into Media Interview. Neil was on his stump, in grand ripping form, about how the digital music format that […] &amp#x27A1;
2012Hosted By Hippies cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog With one final oooooooomph I have freed mysefl of web hosting/strangulation from Dreamhost, to the new free loving set up contrived by Tim Owens, http://hippiehosting.org– and experiment that is bearing fruit for a bunch of new possibilities of making domains of one’s own an even […] &amp#x27A1;
2010Live Audio Streaming Second Life cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I’ve spent the past 3 days working behind the scenes for the NMC ;SL Pro! conference We had a lot of challenges with voice chat on day 1, so I fiddled a bit to see what I could do to provide a live audio stream. The trick with […] &amp#x27A1;
2006WIth Enough Money To Purchase a Moderate Sized Country, You’d Think… More idle, internet-less ramblings while sitting on the plane… Anyhow, I’ve flipped through a bunch of magazines lately. One thing I like to do is look at the use of visuals in communicating a message, especially advertisements. Long long ago, when I taught a computer animation class (we were using Director 5.0 if that gives […] &amp#x27A1; Less Than Half Full Podcasts In preparation for next week’s series of demos on podcasts, I’ve downloaded likely more than I have in the last 10 months. The sheer number of them is turning out to be more staggering than I thought. Content varies, production quality varies, all according to typical distribution curves. I am listening to a bunch flying […] &amp#x27A1; Presentation Interruptus flickr foto Presentation Interruptusavailable on my flickr Here at the New Media Consortium (NMC) Directors meeting in Austin, I was doing a reprise of the 5 Minutes of Fame session at EDUCAUSE ELI Conference. This was supposedly highlighting the NMC Horizon Report section on "Phones in Their Pocket" — the report suggesting cell phone technology […] &amp#x27A1;
2005I’ve been Skyped, Flossed A few weeks ago I was audio interviewed via Skype by Teemu Arina, a 1 hour plus session between me in Arizona and Teemu in Finland that was remarkably clear, had no dropouts. In an almost heroic effort, Teemu edited this to a pod/webcast, painstakingly removing my frequent “umms” as well as abstracting my free […] &amp#x27A1; Wow! What a Portfolio-lific Day Just wrapping up from today’s event “ePortfolio Dialogue Day: Digital Stories of Deep Learning for Students and Faculty” with our excellent guest Helen Barrett, and it was a rousing success. Wish I could have been blogging it all, but other duties called. Helen gave an outstanding overview of the eportfolio landscape, and hammering the not […] &amp#x27A1; SoFIA Releases First 8 Open Content Courses Sofia (Sharing of Free Intellectual Assets) intends to do for the community college level what MIT’s Open Courseware offers for upper division courses- free, open content courses you can use in whole or part. Free with Creative Commons licensing. The first 8 courses are available from their gallery: The pilot grant open content initiative, Sofia […] &amp#x27A1;
2004Biff Cantrell / MLX Appearance at NMC Spring Online Conference Rumors are that elusive character, Biff Cantrell, will be appearing at the New Media Consortium Spring Online Conference (March 8-11, 2004). The NMC Series of Online Conferences is a new form of meetings based on social computing concepts and delivered entirely online through a collaboration with NMC partners iCohere and Macromedia. The unique environment allows […] &amp#x27A1;

to get the arrow codes he likes. This works because output for each found post looks like

// 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.