Sunday, January 02, 2011
The inexorable march of technology
- From
- Steve Crane <XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>
- To
- Sean Conner <spc@conman.org>
- Subject
- Re: @siwisdom twitter feed
- Date
- Sun, 2 Jan 2011 10:53:12 +0200
Hi Sean,
I see you blogged about this, stating that the problem occurs in Twitter's own web client too. I found that interesting as I don't see the problem in the Twitter web client. As shown in this screenshot it all looks fine.
![[SiWisdom on Chrome]](/2011/01/02/a.png "SiWisdom on Chrome")
I'm using Google Chrome and I wondered if the browser may be playing some part so I opened the same page in Internet Explorer, which I only use under duress, and what a difference.
![[SiWisdom on Crack—I mean on IE]](/2011/01/02/b.png "SiWisdom on Crack—I mean on IE")
There's the problem, as large as life, but the UI looks different. I recall that I opted to use the new UI a while ago and not being logged in Twitter must showing me the old UI, presumably still the default. So I log in and voila, the same UI I see in Chrome, with all characters represented correctly.
![[SiWisdom strung out—I mean on IE]](/2011/01/02/c.png "SiWisdom strung out—I mean on IE")
So we can conclude from this that there was indeed a problem; it was Twitter's fault; and they have addressed it in their new UI. This leaves only third party clients to fXXX things up for you.
Cheers.
Oh, now he tells me, after I make sure mod_blog works with
UTF-8 (it handled a post written in a Runic alphabet just
fine), reconfigured the webserver to serve up the appropriate headers and
converted the data file for Silicone Wisdom to UTF-8.
Okay, it didn't take me that long, and as my friend Jeff said:
It is no longer an ASCII world, it's a Unicode one. I have run in to this a lot and anything that uses XML, like a Twitter feed is going to be encoded into UTF-8. It is profoundly annoying, but spreading.
And progress marches on …
Update a few seconds later …
The automatic posting to MyFaceSpaceBook revealed a similar issue. It is to laugh.
![[The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades]](https://www.conman.org/people/spc/about/2023/1023.t.jpg "The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades")