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 27 posts previously published on January 31st

2025Where Do We Go? Here? There? Everywhere! Tis here a bubbling goo of a post. It’s been oozing in my drafts folder, the one between my ears. And iits actually not even new. But I have been getting these questions from a few corners, seeing the ripples everywhere. I am already lined up to vent my opinion on at least two panels […]
2024A Recipe for the Disenshittification of Web Recipes Each passing day of trying to read on the web becomes a sad game of dodging pay walls, peeling off pop up pleas for subscriptions, and scraping away the barnacle-like encrustation of more and more ads. Witness the word of the year as coined and preached by Cory Doctorow … the wave of Enshittification. As […]
202215 Twittering Years Usually it’s the kind of notification from the twitter app I dismiss without notice. But given it was the same day I dissed their other big offer I did give some pause of twitter telling me it was 15 years ago today I signed up for their silly service. No I am not going to […] Annotating… Uphill Both Ways… into the Wind The British flavor of English provides the ideal descriptive term for what this and most of my blogging covers (and expect it to show up as a category or tag). And it fits for writing here about my Annotation Blues. Without Grandpa Internet pulling out a memory of annotating web pages in the Mosaic browser […]
2021#NetNarr 5 No it’s not that show. But yes, I am back co-teaching Network Narratives with Mia Zamora for a group of intrepid graduate students at Kean University. For the full (of something) story on this adventure, you could tune into the podcast we did a few weeks ago with Terry Greene and Anne-Marie Scott for Check […]
2019Can You PechaImprov the Topic of this post? I present a wee test for you, kind, gentle savvy reader. Have a run through these 10 random images, and see if you can guess the topic of this post (no scrolling, eh?) How did you do? When I tested it out myself, I was not sure I could pass my own guess test. Yes, […]
2017Dad’s Radio Cancer took Dad in August 2001. I don’t want to do the arithmetic on how long ago that was. Yet I did. Where is that point of the trailing off of grief and the acceptance of the norm where your parent is gone? It’s not defined at all I think of him when the calendar […]
2015Highs and Lows of Technical Problem Solving There is little like the satisfaction, no that is to tame a word, the exhilaration of solving a problem that you had never addressed before, or thought you could not […]
201310 Ways You Can Be Part of ds106 Without any Cruddy MOOC Drop Out Feeling cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by dmixo6 For open participants in ds106, we can dispense of the entire “I dropped out of another &$*#ing MOOC” because there is nothing to drop out from. No one-pace-for-all ramming speed schedule, no weekly lectures, no multiple guess quizzes. We have a very easy […]
2011Dirty Daffy I am trying to restrain the time sink that might become participating in ds106 radio, but it is easy to get sucked into the vortex. I made a little audio mashup the other not and dropped it in the bin, but you never know exactly where it goes from there- part of that is the […] (Not so Stupid) Browser Tricks On Friday, I am headed down to Scottsdale Community College’s Techtools day. I presented there a few years ago, and this year, they are bringing in the big gun, Bryan Alexander, as keynote. I opted to toss in a session, and hence this thing: The premise (or promise or lack there of of both is: […] The ds106 Abides (with stories) I’m tickled, not ecstatic rolling on the floor, about the response among the ds106 participants in creating examples of mini stories using the tools from 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story. I’ve always wanted to have more examples to include, and ds106 provides, abides, subsidizes…What is really cool is that they seem to […]
2010Patient, Dumb, or Just a Machine? cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog In the morning I noticed my DVD player was still on after watching a movie last night. I’m not sure why I started thinking this, but the machine just sits there flashing "No Disc" for hours, for ever if I let it. Maybe it’s just a patient entity, […]
2008On Conferencing My current report card might read, “Alan needs to improve his attention and focus at professional conferences, and perhaps work on a more positive attitude” On the heels of the 2008 ELI EDUCAUSE annual conference in San Antonio, it’s time to reflect once again on the conference experience. Be reminded, this is my own take, […] Understatement A Fracking Understatement posted 31 Jan ’08, 8.30am MST PST on flickr Twitter is surely loosing fans left and right, and really ought to be sharing more info than this crappy screen. Heck, I;’d rather see the cat in the server picture. I know! It was the severe twittering at the ELI EDUCAUSE conference that […]
2007We Blog Cartoons- A Serendipity Production I just love it when I find something cool on the web by accident. We Blog Cartoons does something almost no other cartoon site does– it lets you republish the cartoons without any copyright restrictions (how many times have you used that New Yorker one about “no one in the internet knows you are a […] If I Fall Into One More Social Network Tool I’m Going To Scream Like a Banshee I am being sarcastic, but am curious as to the point where we have so many social network tools, accounts, and activities, that we do nothing but link together. With some trepididation, I actually fell into two more today (LinkedIn and Twitter), with some interesting comparisons on the experience. Over the past months or more, […] I Won a Contest! It’s not everydayavailable on flickr Even better than second place and collecting $10, I won first place and got $50 donated to the American Diabetes Association- see And the winner is .. and some reflections on user-generated content: As many of you know, I celebrated a milestone birthday this month. To celebrate, I concocted an […] Sketch. Map. Go to Mountain View. For the Google sketchers, mappers, and fans who want to earn a trip to the Googleplex, see Show us your university campus in 3D: Today the Build Your Campus in 3D Competition begins. This spring, you and your (presumably equally artistic) friends can honor your campus turf as you hone your 3D design skills just […] Sniff… No More Old Skool Koolness What a sad day it is when us old skool flickrites now have to wear the official uniform — just got my note from the principal: What this is referring to is those with flickr accounts had previously, on signing in to flickr, had to follow the extra “Psssss…” link to get to the 5% […]
2006Phone In Your Pocket: Five Minutes of Fame The closing sessions of the EDUCAUSE ELI conference was the New Media Consortium’s release of the 2006 Horizon Report on Emerging Technologies. This was the second year I was on the advisory board, and this year we notched it up quite a bit by doing all of our collaboration on a wiki at MIT. This […] Fish Tacos Achieved Ultimate, penultimate, ultra-ultimate… we found the holy grail at Blue Water Seafood in San Diego. Brian and I celebrated the fruits of our presentation labor here with fabulously fresh swordfish and mahi-mahi tacos. Yes, to all those who asked us during the EDUCAUSE ELI Conference, we took this quest very seriously. It’s all in the […] Remiss on Conference Coverage Ouch, trying to cover a full day’s EDUCAUSE ELI activity in one blog and I made a glaring omission. Steve and his students Liz and Dean did a 5 star presentation on using wikis to empower student learning — I think EDUCAUSE needs to encourage much, much more of having students participate or lead in […] ELI All In One Blog I’ve more or less resigned myself that I have little interest in doing intensive (or any) blog note-taking at conferences. It’s easy to get caught up in the idea of recording it for yourself and others, but it ends up feeling a bit like being one of the transcribing monks (the one with bad fingers). […]
2005Down On The Server Farm flickr foto MCLI Server "Farm"available on my flickr A tour of the mcli server “farm”, more of an agglomeration. Starting from the left, we have “Jade”, a 1.33GhZ Apple Xserver that runs CogDogBlog (weblog plus a few more), the Feed2JS site as well as virtual hosting Maricopa eP, an electronic portolio system. The Xserve also […]
2004The Elephant Flies, Soars (Pachyderm / Learning Object Dialogue Day) The energy was electric yesterday at our system’s first introduction to “Pachyderm” at our Pachyderm: Building Meaningful Content with Learning Objects Dialogue Day. The reaction to the potential of Pachyderm and the level of participation in the afternoon activities were beyond our wildest expectations. Much had to do with the enthusiasm guest speaker Peter Samis […] “Type, Don’t Click, URLs” sez Microsoft Microsoft provides this “hard to believe someone wrote it seriously and they were not smoking crack” Knowledge Base article Steps that you can take to help identify and to help protect yourself from deceptive (spoofed) Web sites and malicious hyperlinks.. In a nutshell, the smart folks in Redmind suggest that you type all in the […]

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

On Michael’s site he might use

There are 27 posts previously published on January 31st

2025Where Do We Go? Here? There? Everywhere! Tis here a bubbling goo of a post. It’s been oozing in my drafts folder, the one between my ears. And iits actually not even new. But I have been getting these questions from a few corners, seeing the ripples everywhere. I am already lined up to vent my opinion on at least two panels […] &amp#x27A1;
2024A Recipe for the Disenshittification of Web Recipes Each passing day of trying to read on the web becomes a sad game of dodging pay walls, peeling off pop up pleas for subscriptions, and scraping away the barnacle-like encrustation of more and more ads. Witness the word of the year as coined and preached by Cory Doctorow … the wave of Enshittification. As […] &amp#x27A1;
202215 Twittering Years Usually it’s the kind of notification from the twitter app I dismiss without notice. But given it was the same day I dissed their other big offer I did give some pause of twitter telling me it was 15 years ago today I signed up for their silly service. No I am not going to […] &amp#x27A1; Annotating… Uphill Both Ways… into the Wind The British flavor of English provides the ideal descriptive term for what this and most of my blogging covers (and expect it to show up as a category or tag). And it fits for writing here about my Annotation Blues. Without Grandpa Internet pulling out a memory of annotating web pages in the Mosaic browser […] &amp#x27A1;
2021#NetNarr 5 No it’s not that show. But yes, I am back co-teaching Network Narratives with Mia Zamora for a group of intrepid graduate students at Kean University. For the full (of something) story on this adventure, you could tune into the podcast we did a few weeks ago with Terry Greene and Anne-Marie Scott for Check […] &amp#x27A1;
2019Can You PechaImprov the Topic of this post? I present a wee test for you, kind, gentle savvy reader. Have a run through these 10 random images, and see if you can guess the topic of this post (no scrolling, eh?) How did you do? When I tested it out myself, I was not sure I could pass my own guess test. Yes, […] &amp#x27A1;
2017Dad’s Radio Cancer took Dad in August 2001. I don’t want to do the arithmetic on how long ago that was. Yet I did. Where is that point of the trailing off of grief and the acceptance of the norm where your parent is gone? It’s not defined at all I think of him when the calendar […] &amp#x27A1;
2015Highs and Lows of Technical Problem Solving There is little like the satisfaction, no that is to tame a word, the exhilaration of solving a problem that you had never addressed before, or thought you could not […] &amp#x27A1;
201310 Ways You Can Be Part of ds106 Without any Cruddy MOOC Drop Out Feeling cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by dmixo6 For open participants in ds106, we can dispense of the entire “I dropped out of another &$*#ing MOOC” because there is nothing to drop out from. No one-pace-for-all ramming speed schedule, no weekly lectures, no multiple guess quizzes. We have a very easy […] &amp#x27A1;
2011Dirty Daffy I am trying to restrain the time sink that might become participating in ds106 radio, but it is easy to get sucked into the vortex. I made a little audio mashup the other not and dropped it in the bin, but you never know exactly where it goes from there- part of that is the […] &amp#x27A1; (Not so Stupid) Browser Tricks On Friday, I am headed down to Scottsdale Community College’s Techtools day. I presented there a few years ago, and this year, they are bringing in the big gun, Bryan Alexander, as keynote. I opted to toss in a session, and hence this thing: The premise (or promise or lack there of of both is: […] &amp#x27A1; The ds106 Abides (with stories) I’m tickled, not ecstatic rolling on the floor, about the response among the ds106 participants in creating examples of mini stories using the tools from 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story. I’ve always wanted to have more examples to include, and ds106 provides, abides, subsidizes…What is really cool is that they seem to […] &amp#x27A1;
2010Patient, Dumb, or Just a Machine? cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog In the morning I noticed my DVD player was still on after watching a movie last night. I’m not sure why I started thinking this, but the machine just sits there flashing "No Disc" for hours, for ever if I let it. Maybe it’s just a patient entity, […] &amp#x27A1;
2008On Conferencing My current report card might read, “Alan needs to improve his attention and focus at professional conferences, and perhaps work on a more positive attitude” On the heels of the 2008 ELI EDUCAUSE annual conference in San Antonio, it’s time to reflect once again on the conference experience. Be reminded, this is my own take, […] &amp#x27A1; Understatement A Fracking Understatement posted 31 Jan ’08, 8.30am MST PST on flickr Twitter is surely loosing fans left and right, and really ought to be sharing more info than this crappy screen. Heck, I;’d rather see the cat in the server picture. I know! It was the severe twittering at the ELI EDUCAUSE conference that […] &amp#x27A1;
2007We Blog Cartoons- A Serendipity Production I just love it when I find something cool on the web by accident. We Blog Cartoons does something almost no other cartoon site does– it lets you republish the cartoons without any copyright restrictions (how many times have you used that New Yorker one about “no one in the internet knows you are a […] &amp#x27A1; If I Fall Into One More Social Network Tool I’m Going To Scream Like a Banshee I am being sarcastic, but am curious as to the point where we have so many social network tools, accounts, and activities, that we do nothing but link together. With some trepididation, I actually fell into two more today (LinkedIn and Twitter), with some interesting comparisons on the experience. Over the past months or more, […] &amp#x27A1; I Won a Contest! It’s not everydayavailable on flickr Even better than second place and collecting $10, I won first place and got $50 donated to the American Diabetes Association- see And the winner is .. and some reflections on user-generated content: As many of you know, I celebrated a milestone birthday this month. To celebrate, I concocted an […] &amp#x27A1; Sketch. Map. Go to Mountain View. For the Google sketchers, mappers, and fans who want to earn a trip to the Googleplex, see Show us your university campus in 3D: Today the Build Your Campus in 3D Competition begins. This spring, you and your (presumably equally artistic) friends can honor your campus turf as you hone your 3D design skills just […] &amp#x27A1; Sniff… No More Old Skool Koolness What a sad day it is when us old skool flickrites now have to wear the official uniform — just got my note from the principal: What this is referring to is those with flickr accounts had previously, on signing in to flickr, had to follow the extra “Psssss…” link to get to the 5% […] &amp#x27A1;
2006Phone In Your Pocket: Five Minutes of Fame The closing sessions of the EDUCAUSE ELI conference was the New Media Consortium’s release of the 2006 Horizon Report on Emerging Technologies. This was the second year I was on the advisory board, and this year we notched it up quite a bit by doing all of our collaboration on a wiki at MIT. This […] &amp#x27A1; Fish Tacos Achieved Ultimate, penultimate, ultra-ultimate… we found the holy grail at Blue Water Seafood in San Diego. Brian and I celebrated the fruits of our presentation labor here with fabulously fresh swordfish and mahi-mahi tacos. Yes, to all those who asked us during the EDUCAUSE ELI Conference, we took this quest very seriously. It’s all in the […] &amp#x27A1; Remiss on Conference Coverage Ouch, trying to cover a full day’s EDUCAUSE ELI activity in one blog and I made a glaring omission. Steve and his students Liz and Dean did a 5 star presentation on using wikis to empower student learning — I think EDUCAUSE needs to encourage much, much more of having students participate or lead in […] &amp#x27A1; ELI All In One Blog I’ve more or less resigned myself that I have little interest in doing intensive (or any) blog note-taking at conferences. It’s easy to get caught up in the idea of recording it for yourself and others, but it ends up feeling a bit like being one of the transcribing monks (the one with bad fingers). […] &amp#x27A1;
2005Down On The Server Farm flickr foto MCLI Server "Farm"available on my flickr A tour of the mcli server “farm”, more of an agglomeration. Starting from the left, we have “Jade”, a 1.33GhZ Apple Xserver that runs CogDogBlog (weblog plus a few more), the Feed2JS site as well as virtual hosting Maricopa eP, an electronic portolio system. The Xserve also […] &amp#x27A1;
2004The Elephant Flies, Soars (Pachyderm / Learning Object Dialogue Day) The energy was electric yesterday at our system’s first introduction to “Pachyderm” at our Pachyderm: Building Meaningful Content with Learning Objects Dialogue Day. The reaction to the potential of Pachyderm and the level of participation in the afternoon activities were beyond our wildest expectations. Much had to do with the enthusiasm guest speaker Peter Samis […] &amp#x27A1; “Type, Don’t Click, URLs” sez Microsoft Microsoft provides this “hard to believe someone wrote it seriously and they were not smoking crack” Knowledge Base article Steps that you can take to help identify and to help protect yourself from deceptive (spoofed) Web sites and malicious hyperlinks.. In a nutshell, the smart folks in Redmind suggest that you type all in the […] &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.