Blat News

I’ve spent the last two weeks giving Blat a facelift and fixing various little things that have never worked properly. So while I was on a roll, I thought I’d also fix the character encoding for the Random Blog functionality on the Blat home page.

I’m not sure how many Blat users have noticed that the character encoding for the Random Blog functionality was incorrect (I’m not even sure how many Blat users know that the Random Blog functionality exists). For those that didn’t notice, sometimes question marks or funny little blocks were displayed, rather than the correct characters being displayed. For those who are interested, the problem was being caused by incorrectly encoded characters being returned by the AJAX call. The characters were encoded as ISO-8859-1 rather than UTF-8.

Anyway, it has been fixed, and the AJAX call now returns UTF-8 characters.

I also changed the functionality behind the Next Random Blog button, so that while the AJAX call is in progress, the button label will read Please wait…

I’m sure that many people thought that the Next Random Blog button didn’t work