Maintenance: Shady Characters

As you may or may not have noticed (more likely the latter), this blog was down for a chunk of the afternoon. I had to fix something, and, well, it took a bit longer than usual. You may have noticed that you’d see garbage characters like “ÃƒÂ¶” pop up in posts and comments. That’s because some time ago a WordPress upgrade changed the character encodings. I didn’t consider it a high priority issue and let it sit until now.

Following this article, I converted everything over only to realize that none of the actual characters were converted properly. Instead of trying to debug SQL scripts that could potentially destroy all my data, I went through and edited every character encoding screw-up by hand. It wasn’t so bad with my posts since I pretty much remember what I put in there. Fixing user comments was a different matter. Being on a perfectionist tear, I used the Wayback Machine to find the comments before I performed the fateful WP upgrade just to figure out if somebody used a smart quote or an em-dash. Fun.

Hopefully everything is back up and fixed. If you notice any other garbage characters floating around, please post here so I can fix it.

And yes, I’m overdue for a real post. All you have to do is ÃƒâπÃ€Ã¬â,Ã¶å¢Ã,Å,Ã¬Ã£âπÃ∫, and I just might be compelled to write something.