Fixed my web site

After a few years of upgrades to the hosting of my web site (PHP 4.2->5.0->5.1->5.2) and expected changes on the world wide web my site became pretty broken. I can now proudly say I have fixed most of the bugs on this site. The biggest problem was updating how I was aggregating news feeds, I only had to update my code to support RSS 0.91/2.0, RSS 1.0, RDF, ATOM "channel", and ATOM "entry". Yay for standards.

I need to vent

Grr, f***, sh**, a** f***! I am setting up one of my PHP CMS's and was having trouble with non-ASCII characters. After pulling my hair out and endless googling I found the problem, htmlentities(). It turns out that htmlentities() is set to ISO-8859-1 by default and needs a specific parameter to be UTF-8.

I found this:

/**
 * Encodes HTML safely for UTF-8. Use instead of htmlentities.
 *
 * @param string $var
 * @return string
 */
function html_encode($var)
{
 return htmlentities($var, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8') ;
}

Here:
http://developer.loftdigital.com/blog/php-utf-8-cheatsheet

Coco Contacts

A friend of mine has created this site that sells freaking cool contact lenses. I've seen fashion / colored contacts before but Coco Contacts has a huge range of really cool eye contacts that I've never seen before such as soccer balls and smiley faces.

Personally I'd like to get some for the next Halloween / StarWars / cross-dressing party I attend.

New blog from blogger.com

I have got myself a new blog thanks to blogger.com. I have set it up so it can be viewed directly from my web site and anyone can make comments. Comments won't appear directly on the web site until they have been approved and comments may be removed if they are deemed inappropriate.