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The Future of the Blogosphere

ribbonfarm.com · 2,214 words · saved by 1 readers

Two weeks ago, I was trying to finish up a blog post when I noticed a bunch of weird characters showing up in posts. Here’s a sample from Worldly, Yet Carefree: It turned out to be a fairly complex problem, with roots in the sheer age of this blog (2007) and crud inherited from generations of updates to WordPress, MySQL, and indirectly I suppose, PHP. Turns out, the weird characters were due to UTF8 characters being tagged as latin1 characters, and then re-encoded as UTF8. This was due to MySQL’s history of dealing badly with character sets, and WordPress making janky accommodations for that. The most recent MySQL update finally did something that made an invisible problem a visible one. My rather expensive hosting service, WPEngine (whose database migration process caused the break, since it was apparently unaware of ancient-blog problems), basically threw up their hands and said they could do nothing after a couple of unhelpful support chats. Finally, Dorian Taylor, with some help fr

Two weeks ago, I was trying to finish up a blog post when I noticed a bunch of weird characters showing up in posts. Here's a sample from Worldly, Yet Carefree : Discuss with vgr_zirp → It turned out to be a fairly complex problem, with roots in the sheer age of this blog (2007) and crud inherited from generations of updates to WordPress, MySQL, and indirectly I suppose, PHP. Turns out, the weird characters were due to UTF8 characters being tagged as latin1 characters, and then re -encoded as UTF8. This was due to MySQL's history of dealing badly with character sets, and WordPress making janky

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