It’s been just over a month since I plunged for an account at blo.gs and with a bit of secret PHP kung-fu kludged up a working blogroll which I’m rather pleased with. However, something that bugged me since day 0 was the fact Unicode wasn’t being handled properly…
As an example, Inese’s site description should have been display as “Inese Dūka” but was actually getting displayed as “Inese DÅ«ka”. Now Inese’s site was using UTF-8 throughout and the issue appeared to be the fact blo.gs were taking UTF-8 strings, treating them as if they were ISO-8859-1, then outputting them as UTF-8… Gah!
Whilst I could fix it with a little bit of PHP:
ereg_replace("D\xC3\x85\xC2\xABka", "D\xC5\xABka", $foo);
… it still meant loads of other blogs, mainly the ones using Asian text, were having their characters mangled so having popped an email to their support in the middle of Decemeber last year, I’ve finally got a reply today saying that they’ve finally fixed the annoyance which I can confirm to be the case! :D