My Brief and Sloppy Affair with Indiewebring ramblinggit.com
@bradenslen 1. If you’re on a Mac, I highly reccommend UnicodeChecker to do conversions and such. 2. Non-ASCII characters in URL paths are supposed to be percent-encoded (aka url-encoded), so you’ll need to do that for the next/previous links. 3. Some time ago, WordPress had a problem (like truncating posts!) where certain database encodings didn’t like characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), which describes most emoji. That problem should have been fixed some time ago, but the fix depended on the PHP and MySQL versions available on a blog’s host and may not have run if you upgraded to the new WP version and your PHP/MySQL combo was too old…. But it’s also possible that if that was fixed, the widget maybe was expecting only BMP Unicode characters and didn’t know how to handle non-BMP characters and went haywire…. You probably need a real WordPress guru to help you figure out what went wrong, especially if it recurs when using the footer plugin :-(
@bradenslen I had the same problem, though not as bad, with the indiewebring emojis. I ended up encoding them with textmate. This HTML entity encoder/decoder looks like it did the same thing. There is note on the indieweb site: indiewebring - IndieWeb which I didn't see till later.
@smokey Hi Smokey, I suspect it may just be a limitation of the widget. But I was unwilling to take the risk in the footer. I was just amazed at how what should have been a 5 minute copy/paste job turned into hours of trying to jump through hoops! LOL. It’s not the first time it’s happened to me and I’m sure it won’t be the last. (I’m still amazed that a comment on Micro.blog appears on my blog. It’s like Elven magic. This ability to communicate across domains and platforms is so neat it still boggles my mind.) Many thanks for commenting!
@johnjohnston Hi John, Thanks for taking the time to post the link to that encoder/decoder! Heh, if I had found that we might not be having this conversation. Based on my experience, I’m not convinced about the use of emoji from a usability standpoint. However the marketing side of my brain says they are cool, minimalist, different and eye catching which makes them great for the Indiewebring from a marketing perspective.
Anyway, it was a good learning experience.