Well Flip My Bozo Bit

Christopher Horrell

Jul 9, 2004 — 2 min read

So yeah, validating is a bitch to be sure. I was having a hell of a time yesterday correcting some validation errors that were base on character encoding. It all had to do with me switching the site from ISO 8859-1 to UTF 8. Ok, there's a lot of background here I need to fill you in on. I've been pretty busy over the last few months doing a whole wack of things, hence my infrequent posting.

Several weeks ago I signed up to be a member of the TextDrive VC200. It was a sweet deal and a damn fine hosting service even without this offer. So anyway, I moved my site over to the new server which serves all my files as UTF-8. No problem at first but then I got some wacky validation errors and it took me hella-long to resolve them.

Of course, moving the site over was painful in its own particular way too. I started out trying to move my Movable Type installation and that got complicated -- never do this sort of thing late at night. Then I had the brilliant idea of switching over to WordPress which I thought would be easier than moving my current configuration over. Big mistake. Don't get me wrong, it's a damn fine CMS, but I'm just not too familiar with it and I couldn't port over my Movable Type templates without seriously b0rking my site. Chalk that up to my poor knowledge of PHP and mod rewrite. Mod rewrite is very cool and very powerful allowing you to do very complicated URL rewriting, but things can go pear shaped very quickly if you don't know what you're doing. It also helps to have a decent knowledge of Regex (regular expressions).

On top of all that I was buying a condo, applying for a mortgage, and dedicating some free time to Habitat for Humanity, a wonderful cause that I'll be hope be a part of again in the future.

Oh, and my BlogSnob link broke this morning which took out all the pages of my site (TextDrive support to the rescue). Apparently if a PHP include doesn't have any content the whole page won't display. Not exactly liberal parsing although under a completely different context.

Update: The problem I had doesn't necessarily have to do with BlogSnob and I'm still looking into it. I tested out the PHP include and it's working again. I also tried out a PHP include with a broken link and the page still displays, so there goes that theory.

So yeah, things were pretty busy on the Christopher front.

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