You might expect a post with this title to herald some amazing news about somebody halfway round the world installing GUFF. Hell, even if it were someone in Ireland, I'd still report it that way. But, no, it's actually far more mundane.

A frequent visitor to GUFF would probably have noticed that many of the post headlines contained spurious question marks. This happened because many of our esteemed contributors use Wordpress, which has the tendency to convert apostrophes to smart quotes, triple-periods into ellipses, and so on. Such bourgeois fripperies were not accommodated by either the old version of MagpieRSS, or by the ISO 8859-1 character set previously used in GUFF.

Installing version 0.7, and changing the character set of the pages to UTF-8 has done the trick, and these characters should now appear as intended. You may, however, notice some issues in the archives, where there could be ISO 8859-1-specific encodings which are different in UTF-8: this is unavoidable, since the data are not necessarily still available from the respective feeds.

Still, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelete.

Cheers,

Derek.

PS. I now invite all comers to try and break it with their post content. Good luck!

Jack said:
I love the web sometimes - I was just Googling to solve the MagpieRSS question mark issue on part of my site, which is aggregated on GUFF, and find the answer here, in a post about GUFF.

Small world.

Derek said:
Which is all very well for extracting the contents of an egg, but does that an omelete make?

Chris Miller said:
You could probably syringe the contents of the egg out without breaking the shell. Or "blow" the egg, which is not as sexual as it sounds.

Breaking is a good way of getting to the insides as well though!

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