Saturday April 7, 2018; 9:01 AM EDT
If you've been reading this blog for the last week or so, it must be very confusing. The result of my confusion. I finally had to understand encoding on the web. I wanted feedBase to work for feeds in all languages. The web went through a transition to make it work that way. At UserLand, Jake and Brent did the encoding stuff. I hoped that my new app, feedBase, would "just work." Didn't happen.#- There were two problems:#
- My connection to the feedparser package was not encoding-aware. This, btw, is also true in River5. Rather than do a solution just for feedBase, I did a general solution, coming up with the API that I wanted on Node, basically the same API that we have in Frontier. I will use that package in River5. Hopefully that will make the transition much easier than it otherwise would be. #
- My SQL database wasn't set up for Unicode. So I had to figure out the magic incantations to make it work that way. As with feed parsing, I had hoped it would just work. But I had some excellent help from the newly assembled MySQL mentorship group, again mostly consisting, of course, of JY. He's a real life-saver. #
- Anyway, I'm keeping my eye on it, but I'm hoping now to be able to move on. 💥#