j’s scratchpad

I understand a few of you had problems receiving j’s scratchpad’s feed on Thursday, June 21. I put some m dashes in the quote I used from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Apparently, they were enough to blank the XML feed WordPress produces.

I believe it was the m dashes (—, 'mdash;) because it was the only thing different about the weblog on Thursday and the other weblogs on this server seemed to have working feeds. When I viewed j’s scratchpad’s feed, the page was blank. As an experiment, I removed the m dashs from the tagline and viewed the page again. Voila! Feed! When I put them back in, the page blanked out again. Various HTML elements frequently cause problems in Wordpress. I experienced similar problems in Manila. Some of that has to do with how HTML elements and other characters are processed in the forms used to add content on the site. I know from other things I’ve tried to do with this weblog’s tagline that I can’t use any number of HTML elements in the tagline that I could in Manila, like links and line breaks. It doesn’t surprise me very much that the m dash would cause problems, too.

As you might expect, I find bugs oddities things that don’t quite work right in WordPress occasionally. Most of the time, they’re problems on the backend that prevent me from doing something I could do on other blog platforms. I think this problem might be the first one I’ve accidentally found that impacted you readers. My apologies for the inadvertent disruption.

I hope I remember not to use m dashes in the tagline, but no promises~

This entry was posted on Friday, June 22nd, 2007 at 12:20 am and is filed under About this Weblog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.