Another Day, Another Portal

I was particularly excited when one participant asked for an RSS feed of the Holidailies. Journal writers often are stereotyped as technologically backwards (as well as big margarita drinkers). As this demonstrates, that's not fair. I was pleased to satisfy this request. I should remember that whenever I do a project that involves topically or chronically organized quanta of information, there should be an RSS version.

I am particularly frustrated by goddamn non-standard Microsoft character sets. I suspect people are writing their entry synopses in Microsoft Word and cut-n-pasting into the web form. When they do this, they end up using character codes that are not legal in the international character sets used on the web. I'm tempted to change the portal code to just bounce entries with these characters, but the technically inept journal writers (ooops! there's that ugly stereotype again) will never figure it out.

The solution I'm heading towards is accepting the input, but when rendering the output pass the text through a lookup table that converts codes that correspond to illegal character positions to the Unicode representation of the windows-1252 glyph. That is, for instance, “smart quotes” are replaced with the numeric entities “ and ”.

So, if you'll excuse me, I need to find my "Will Code Portals for Food" sign and head on down to the Drag.