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] [1]
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] [2]
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] [3]
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 [4] works with UTF-8 (it handled a post written in a Runic alphabet [5] just fine), reconfigured the webserver to serve up the appropriate headers and converted the data file for Silicone Wisdom [6] to UTF-8.
Okay, it didn't take me that long, and as my friend Jeff [7] said:
It is no longer an ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) world, it's a Unicode one. I have run in to this a lot and anything that uses XML (eXtensible Markup Language), like a Twitter feed is going to be encoded into UTF-8. It is profoundly annoying, but spreading.
And progress marches on …
The automatic posting to MyFaceSpaceBook [8] revealed a similar issue. It is to laugh.
[4] https://boston.conman.org/about/technical.html
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runic_alphabet
[6] http://twitter.com/siwisdom
![[1] /boston/2011/01/02/a.png](/gemini.conman.org/boston/2011/01/02/a.png){kind=link}
![[2] /boston/2011/01/02/b.png](/gemini.conman.org/boston/2011/01/02/b.png){kind=link}
![[3] /boston/2011/01/02/c.png](/gemini.conman.org/boston/2011/01/02/c.png){kind=link}