Common Craft Blog
Help With Funky RSS Feed Text
By leelefever on May 11, 2005 - 10:09am
I've gotten a couple of reports from readers that the text in my RSS feeds is getting funkified. Both of the people who have reported it are Mac users and I'm not sure about their RSS readers. It appears that wherever there is an apostrophe, weird characters are being inserted into the feed text.
Does anyone have an idea why this is happening or how to fix it?
I’ve tagged all of my photos from the trip on Flickr (and this post) with the “westbeach†tag. This made me think about the folks who run WestBeach and what this tagging stuff means to them. Here are some (admittedly idealistic) thoughts…
Thanks to Steve Hall for reminding me about this today.
Help With Funky RSS Feed Text
Lee: Short answer... smart quotes. Avoid them.
Long answer... I'm no i18n specialist, but it's probably an encoding issue. Your feed is being served as ISO-8859-1, rather than something more universal like UTF-8. It's possible that the problematic aggregators are expecting a different encoding, and things are getting scrambled.
It's also possible that the scramble is on your end, but it doesn't look that way to my unlearned eye.
Help With Funky RSS Feed Text
For the record, it isn't just MacPeople... I'm seeing broken characters in Newzcrawler under Windows XP.
Are you pasting in from Word?
Help With Funky RSS Feed Text
If you're pasting from Word or other office apps that convert single and double quotes to smart quotes and apostrophes, they won't be recognized by other encodings - including UTF-8 if i'm not mistaken.
Help With Funky RSS Feed Text
Thnanks for the comment Roger.
Hmm. I have no idea what i18n is or ISO-8859-1. But, sometimes I do write a blog post in Word and then paste it in (which is what I did for the post in question). Perhaps that is the issue. I know that Word has a way putting a lot of hidden crap in the text.
Do you see it consistently in the feed or is it sporadic?