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 16 posts previously published on May 26th

2025Slop is As Slop Does Slop, slop, slop, each day its more of a effort to not step in the GenAI slop. Can Gump wisdom be any help? The gaffe by the Chicago Sun Times is an easy target, for publishing insert of summer features a list of books to read… that mostly do not exist. It’s almost too easy […]
2018Son of a Lawnman My Dad’s domain as the green grass lawn of our suburban Baltimore home. It was so much, that when he got his personal email address it started with “lawnman”. He was fanatic at watering, seeding, fertilizing, and hand pulling dandelions. In early memories there was some kind of gas powered lawn mower he used that […]
2017Pause As much as I loathe those blog posts or click bait pieces about digital detox or sanctimonious drivel about giving up an iphone for a few weeks I’m letting it be known (as if it matters) that I’m going non-active online for maybe 4 days. The only, only, only reason I bother is that a […]
2016I of Abraham There goes that calendar reminder. Today is the day in 1956 that my grandfather, Abraham passed away, seven years before I was even born. I know he died young; his wife lived until 2003; outliving her husband by 47 years is staggering. I am not sure when he was born, somewhere I have in a […] Occam’s Reuse License For a while I was saving screen shots of some of the convoluted license statements I come across in Wikimedia Commons. There were ones where images were public domain in one country, but of course here in the US Congress every few years extends copyright like another 50 years. One of the most “crappy” set […]
2015My Grandfather Was Kind of a Big Deal in the Construction Business That photo looks a little like me, but that is my grandfather, who passed away 59 years ago today. I can picture that framed image as it was in the wood paneled basement of the house I grew up in Baltimore. It sat in a space on a wall of bookshelves, sitting above the old […]
2014Maricopa OER Practitioners: David Weaver creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog As part of my fellowship for the OER Research Hub at the Open University I am sharing these excerpts from conversations about OER use/creation recorded in April 2014 with faculty at the Maricopa Community Colleges. This is the third of the six that should/will […]
2013No Parking in the #ds106 Zone cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine You don’t sit still or idle here either. This was a “No Parking Tow Away Zone” spotted at the Depew NY train station. The text was easy to replace with Helvetica Neu font; that’s a crop of Rod Serling sitting on the edge […]
2011dotSubbing It’s beena while since I played with dotSUB, the crowdsource site for translating video captions into other languages. I decided to givre it a play with the video I made last month for 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to tell a story. I first uploaded the video to dotSub. I thne noticed that it had an […] From the CogDogLab: Pechaflickr Here is a new toy to play with- announcing Pechaflickr, the pecha kucha + battle decks + flickr mashup. Type in a tag, click “play”, and you will be served up 20 random flickr photos, displayed each for 20 seconds. The idea is to have people practice the art of improv to a set of […]
2006The Smell of Comment Spam Sizzling at Feedburner Sigh, here is another yet another lame comment spam effort I spotted starting today, scanning the scum that is caught in the Spam Karma 2 nets on this blog. Comment spammers are using Feedburner to insert into the URl field things like http://feeds.feedburner.com/BuyHotPokerPillsPorn — all in the hope of hoisting some pages somewhere on the […]
2005Bloggregation As a follow-up to the Emerging Trends workshops at San Diego State University earlier this week, I was asked by participant who had just created new blog sites, “How do we find each others blogs” and by the planners, “Hey Alan, you’re an RSS guru, how can we syndicate them into one place?”. So I […] ABC Radio National (Aussies Podcasting) Let’s give a big “good on ya, ‘mate!” for the Australia’s ABC Radio National site for offering a ton of their audio in mp3 / podcast format. You can poke around the site and find them, or see the listng of the podcast URLs I googled to I Love Radio.org. This discovery was totally web […]
2004Hey, Not So Icky- Inside Blackboard Lurks a Wiki Thanks to a friend inside Blackboard, I got a peek a few weeks ago at a Building Block (plug-ins for Blackboard) that provides a wiki functionality inside the Blackboard environment. I’d put up some screen shots, but the Bb Showcase site seems to be offline right now. What was interesting was the shying away from […] SCORM for Dummies One of our faculty members taking on leadership of our learning objects action group is getting up to speed on learning about learning objects…. Donna sent this “Cliff Notes” version of SCORM: This is an overview of the Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model. It’s hard to make technical standards understandable (much less interesting). Nonetheless, here’s […] Feed2RSS: Minor Cleanups and Fixing My Goofs It’s been nice getting wide and praising notes, comments, trackbask about the new Feed2RSS— I must admit being eager to rush it out and while the MagpieRSS seems to be running smoothly, I had a few minor goofs that others have nicely pointed out. If you started using the new version or have downloaded it, […]

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

On Michael’s site he might use

There are 16 posts previously published on May 26th

2025Slop is As Slop Does Slop, slop, slop, each day its more of a effort to not step in the GenAI slop. Can Gump wisdom be any help? The gaffe by the Chicago Sun Times is an easy target, for publishing insert of summer features a list of books to read… that mostly do not exist. It’s almost too easy […] &amp#x27A1;
2018Son of a Lawnman My Dad’s domain as the green grass lawn of our suburban Baltimore home. It was so much, that when he got his personal email address it started with “lawnman”. He was fanatic at watering, seeding, fertilizing, and hand pulling dandelions. In early memories there was some kind of gas powered lawn mower he used that […] &amp#x27A1;
2017Pause As much as I loathe those blog posts or click bait pieces about digital detox or sanctimonious drivel about giving up an iphone for a few weeks I’m letting it be known (as if it matters) that I’m going non-active online for maybe 4 days. The only, only, only reason I bother is that a […] &amp#x27A1;
2016I of Abraham There goes that calendar reminder. Today is the day in 1956 that my grandfather, Abraham passed away, seven years before I was even born. I know he died young; his wife lived until 2003; outliving her husband by 47 years is staggering. I am not sure when he was born, somewhere I have in a […] &amp#x27A1; Occam’s Reuse License For a while I was saving screen shots of some of the convoluted license statements I come across in Wikimedia Commons. There were ones where images were public domain in one country, but of course here in the US Congress every few years extends copyright like another 50 years. One of the most “crappy” set […] &amp#x27A1;
2015My Grandfather Was Kind of a Big Deal in the Construction Business That photo looks a little like me, but that is my grandfather, who passed away 59 years ago today. I can picture that framed image as it was in the wood paneled basement of the house I grew up in Baltimore. It sat in a space on a wall of bookshelves, sitting above the old […] &amp#x27A1;
2014Maricopa OER Practitioners: David Weaver creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog As part of my fellowship for the OER Research Hub at the Open University I am sharing these excerpts from conversations about OER use/creation recorded in April 2014 with faculty at the Maricopa Community Colleges. This is the third of the six that should/will […] &amp#x27A1;
2013No Parking in the #ds106 Zone cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine You don’t sit still or idle here either. This was a “No Parking Tow Away Zone” spotted at the Depew NY train station. The text was easy to replace with Helvetica Neu font; that’s a crop of Rod Serling sitting on the edge […] &amp#x27A1;
2011dotSubbing It’s beena while since I played with dotSUB, the crowdsource site for translating video captions into other languages. I decided to givre it a play with the video I made last month for 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to tell a story. I first uploaded the video to dotSub. I thne noticed that it had an […] &amp#x27A1; From the CogDogLab: Pechaflickr Here is a new toy to play with- announcing Pechaflickr, the pecha kucha + battle decks + flickr mashup. Type in a tag, click “play”, and you will be served up 20 random flickr photos, displayed each for 20 seconds. The idea is to have people practice the art of improv to a set of […] &amp#x27A1;
2006The Smell of Comment Spam Sizzling at Feedburner Sigh, here is another yet another lame comment spam effort I spotted starting today, scanning the scum that is caught in the Spam Karma 2 nets on this blog. Comment spammers are using Feedburner to insert into the URl field things like http://feeds.feedburner.com/BuyHotPokerPillsPorn — all in the hope of hoisting some pages somewhere on the […] &amp#x27A1;
2005Bloggregation As a follow-up to the Emerging Trends workshops at San Diego State University earlier this week, I was asked by participant who had just created new blog sites, “How do we find each others blogs” and by the planners, “Hey Alan, you’re an RSS guru, how can we syndicate them into one place?”. So I […] &amp#x27A1; ABC Radio National (Aussies Podcasting) Let’s give a big “good on ya, ‘mate!” for the Australia’s ABC Radio National site for offering a ton of their audio in mp3 / podcast format. You can poke around the site and find them, or see the listng of the podcast URLs I googled to I Love Radio.org. This discovery was totally web […] &amp#x27A1;
2004Hey, Not So Icky- Inside Blackboard Lurks a Wiki Thanks to a friend inside Blackboard, I got a peek a few weeks ago at a Building Block (plug-ins for Blackboard) that provides a wiki functionality inside the Blackboard environment. I’d put up some screen shots, but the Bb Showcase site seems to be offline right now. What was interesting was the shying away from […] &amp#x27A1; SCORM for Dummies One of our faculty members taking on leadership of our learning objects action group is getting up to speed on learning about learning objects…. Donna sent this “Cliff Notes” version of SCORM: This is an overview of the Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model. It’s hard to make technical standards understandable (much less interesting). Nonetheless, here’s […] &amp#x27A1; Feed2RSS: Minor Cleanups and Fixing My Goofs It’s been nice getting wide and praising notes, comments, trackbask about the new Feed2RSS— I must admit being eager to rush it out and while the MagpieRSS seems to be running smoothly, I had a few minor goofs that others have nicely pointed out. If you started using the new version or have downloaded it, […] &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.