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 12 posts previously published on March 6th

2025Hey, Cats, Only 9 Lives? I’m Doing 15 Live Web Shows This Week I’m in the late middle of a sheer mad but insanely fun series of events for OE Global’s Open Education Week. That itself is a post or more, with the set up and development of the WordPress web site, an Events calendar plugin, fediversing the events… oh, stop it! But also, I have had to […]
2020Amazing/True Stories of Openness Makes Comeback for Open Education Week Monday I saw the #OEWeek tagged tweets and had some wondering about what I might contribute for Open Education Week. So I dusted off and cleaned up an oldie- my collection of Amazing Stories of Serendipity. This was something that goes back to a 2009 presentation at the Open Education conference. The idea was to […]
2017Secrets Beneath A Chair I bet you don’t ever look to see what’s on the bottom side of your furniture. I didn’t. Not till today. The featured photo on this post is the bottom side of a most special piece of furniture, the rocking chair that belonged to my deceased brother. It has its own story (read only if […]
2016It’s Not the Phones In my last six weeks of travel, and right now sitting in an airport terminal, I noticed how much I am surrounded by people hunched over their phones. In the airport. In restaurants. On the beach. On the beach. On the beach! I bet all those people hunched over their phones in public think, "I'm […] You Can’t Judge These Western Books By Their Similar Covers It’s quite possible I finished four books this month; two may have been started in January, but four in a month is a recent record for me in finishing. Both of these books I bought as part of my interest in westerns and #western106. While both are in the range of western genres, they could […]
2015Burma Card I cannot seem to locate the tweet (the concept that Twitter search really searches everything is shattered every time I try), but a month or two back, @DrGarcia lamented a wee bit some sadness of not receiving letters in the mail. She’s overly generous in the letter writing department. The practice of handwriting letters or […] No Atonement in Irrational Systems I marvel at my blue tickets. Fluttering beneath the windshield wipers of my truck, they represent an ongoing comical example of a consistent proliferation of a tiny amount of an irrational system. I’ve lost count, I’ve gotten maybe 25 of these over four months. I kind of want someone to stand up ant tell parking […]
2014pechaflickr Now Equipped with Super Powers of Photo Credit cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by mylerdude There’s is nothing like a successful, joyful leap. Mine today was accomplished within the space of my programming editor (still BBEdit, the same text editor I started my first web pages with in 1993). I have to say one of my most favorite things made […]
2012Create Something from the Storybox (SXSWedu) Uh oh, the people in my session are just tuned into their devices. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Awesome, that is what I wanted, my session was billed as a BYOT one. This represented the new plan I hope to have for the content I collected last year during my […]
2005Wiki Symposium 2005 Come to San Diego, October 17-18 for the 2005 International Symposium on Wikis: The 2005 International Symposium on Wikis brings together wiki researchers, implementers, and users for the first time. The goal of the symposium is to find a voice for the community. The symposium has a rigorously reviewed research paper track as well as […] Arf Arf… Is This Thing On? I’m back. I think. The last two days have been technically the worst of my career. This is a long story. The bottom line is that this blog is now running on a new URL http://realgar.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/ but things are forarded nicely (.htaccess redirect) so all links to http://cogdogblog.com/alan/ end up here. But that is just […]
2004Breeze– A Mighty Wind– But the Audio Editing Blows Tuesday is my keynote presentation at the NMC Sipring 2004 Online Conference – register now to tune into “Mysteries Revealed! Inside the Maricopa Learning eXchange”. For this presentation I, ahem, went well over the suggested length of 20 minutes, to more than 50 (!) but it covers a lot of ground, and is all pictures, […]

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

On Michael’s site he might use

There are 12 posts previously published on March 6th

2025Hey, Cats, Only 9 Lives? I’m Doing 15 Live Web Shows This Week I’m in the late middle of a sheer mad but insanely fun series of events for OE Global’s Open Education Week. That itself is a post or more, with the set up and development of the WordPress web site, an Events calendar plugin, fediversing the events… oh, stop it! But also, I have had to […] &amp#x27A1;
2020Amazing/True Stories of Openness Makes Comeback for Open Education Week Monday I saw the #OEWeek tagged tweets and had some wondering about what I might contribute for Open Education Week. So I dusted off and cleaned up an oldie- my collection of Amazing Stories of Serendipity. This was something that goes back to a 2009 presentation at the Open Education conference. The idea was to […] &amp#x27A1;
2017Secrets Beneath A Chair I bet you don’t ever look to see what’s on the bottom side of your furniture. I didn’t. Not till today. The featured photo on this post is the bottom side of a most special piece of furniture, the rocking chair that belonged to my deceased brother. It has its own story (read only if […] &amp#x27A1;
2016It’s Not the Phones In my last six weeks of travel, and right now sitting in an airport terminal, I noticed how much I am surrounded by people hunched over their phones. In the airport. In restaurants. On the beach. On the beach. On the beach! I bet all those people hunched over their phones in public think, "I'm […] &amp#x27A1; You Can’t Judge These Western Books By Their Similar Covers It’s quite possible I finished four books this month; two may have been started in January, but four in a month is a recent record for me in finishing. Both of these books I bought as part of my interest in westerns and #western106. While both are in the range of western genres, they could […] &amp#x27A1;
2015Burma Card I cannot seem to locate the tweet (the concept that Twitter search really searches everything is shattered every time I try), but a month or two back, @DrGarcia lamented a wee bit some sadness of not receiving letters in the mail. She’s overly generous in the letter writing department. The practice of handwriting letters or […] &amp#x27A1; No Atonement in Irrational Systems I marvel at my blue tickets. Fluttering beneath the windshield wipers of my truck, they represent an ongoing comical example of a consistent proliferation of a tiny amount of an irrational system. I’ve lost count, I’ve gotten maybe 25 of these over four months. I kind of want someone to stand up ant tell parking […] &amp#x27A1;
2014pechaflickr Now Equipped with Super Powers of Photo Credit cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by mylerdude There’s is nothing like a successful, joyful leap. Mine today was accomplished within the space of my programming editor (still BBEdit, the same text editor I started my first web pages with in 1993). I have to say one of my most favorite things made […] &amp#x27A1;
2012Create Something from the Storybox (SXSWedu) Uh oh, the people in my session are just tuned into their devices. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Awesome, that is what I wanted, my session was billed as a BYOT one. This represented the new plan I hope to have for the content I collected last year during my […] &amp#x27A1;
2005Wiki Symposium 2005 Come to San Diego, October 17-18 for the 2005 International Symposium on Wikis: The 2005 International Symposium on Wikis brings together wiki researchers, implementers, and users for the first time. The goal of the symposium is to find a voice for the community. The symposium has a rigorously reviewed research paper track as well as […] &amp#x27A1; Arf Arf… Is This Thing On? I’m back. I think. The last two days have been technically the worst of my career. This is a long story. The bottom line is that this blog is now running on a new URL http://realgar.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/ but things are forarded nicely (.htaccess redirect) so all links to http://cogdogblog.com/alan/ end up here. But that is just […] &amp#x27A1;
2004Breeze– A Mighty Wind– But the Audio Editing Blows Tuesday is my keynote presentation at the NMC Sipring 2004 Online Conference – register now to tune into “Mysteries Revealed! Inside the Maricopa Learning eXchange”. For this presentation I, ahem, went well over the suggested length of 20 minutes, to more than 50 (!) but it covers a lot of ground, and is all pictures, […] &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.