Kim Siever’s Blog

Em dashes—those honking big dashes people use to introduce a break in thought—are not preceded or followed by spaces. Nor does using two hyphens -- count as an em dash. For the record.

Our web server’s character set is ISO-8859-1. This has caused some problems when persons input accented characters or other non-ASCII characters into our database. Well, actually the problems occurred when the information was parsed to a webpage.

I’ve tried fixing this several times, but could not figure out how to set the character set on my MySQL tables to ISO-8859-1. Until today.

It seems the MySQL equivalent of ISO-8859-1 is ‘latin1′. I simply set the tables’ character sets to ‘latin1′, and voilà! Now all my accented characters.

Just thought I’d share in case others have the same problem.

If you are using ‘methodology’ as a replacement for ‘method’, please stop. Not only does it sound pretentious, but to those of us who actually know that ‘methodology’ means ‘the study of working methods’, it reeks of illiteracy.

Just say what you mean. Why complicate everything?