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Why Can't Twitterfeed Read Standard Text Symbols?
Twitterfeed seems to be mangling certain text symbols when it sends them out. The blog posts from both of the blogs I'm using w/ Twitterfeed look fine on Twitter.com, but they look garbled on TinyTwitter and Twitteriffic. Both of these apps were reading the Twitter.com data fine prior to automating the process, so it looks like a Twitterfeed issue.
Example:
On the blog using http://www.mindpollution.org/feed/atom/ as its RSS feed, I post an article with the following title:
Interview: Mark from 'Film'
The title shows up fine on Twitter.com(www.twitter.com/rickmarshall), but on TinyTwitter and Twitteriffic, it shows up as:
Interview: Mark from 'Film'
Posted about this a few days ago in a related thread and haven't heard back yet. Would love to hear back before I go the Twitterfeed=Fired route.
Example:
On the blog using http://www.mindpollution.org/feed/atom/ as its RSS feed, I post an article with the following title:
Interview: Mark from 'Film'
The title shows up fine on Twitter.com(www.twitter.com/rickmarshall), but on TinyTwitter and Twitteriffic, it shows up as:
Interview: Mark from 'Film'
Posted about this a few days ago in a related thread and haven't heard back yet. Would love to hear back before I go the Twitterfeed=Fired route.
I’m getting more disappointed
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Inappropriate?I don't wish to lay blame elsewhere, but as far as I can see twitterfeed posts the encoded characters exactly as they appear in the source feed, and it's twiterrific and tinytwitter who don't handle these characters correctly.
If you view the source of your feed URL, you can e.g. see ...
go see: jessica’s video of bush family @ newsweek
... if you then look at the source of your twitter page, you'll see it unchanged, which is correct. The fact that other applications don't decode this correctly is unfortunately not anything I can really do anything about. One way around it would be to make sure the source feed only contains "plain" quotes etc.1 Comment
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This solves the problem
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Unfortunately, "plain" quotes cause the same problem... This doesn't make sense, as when I twitter via twitter.com or any of the apps (tinytwitter or twitteriffic), it reads fine on everything... the only time when garbled symbols appear is when twitterfeed gets involved... -
Inappropriate?I think the reason that the garbled symbols only appear when twitterfeed is involved is that these symbols only appear in your rss feed, not when you manually type in a quote in twitter or twitterrific.
As I said - your feed doesn't contain plain single quotes - it contains the Unicode character 8217 (right single quotation mark), which is a "richer" single quote (there's a corresponding left single quotation mark). All twitterfeed does is take that Unicode entity "as is" and post it to twitter. This is fine, as your web browser correctly decodes/displays it, just as it does when you read your blog in the first place.
If other applications don't handle these Unicode characters correctly, then all you can do is ask them to add support for them, or change your blog/feed to use plain quotes rather than the Unicode symbols.2 Comments Add a comment
This solves the problem
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Hmm... Okay, that makes sense. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to change the blogs to use plain text/quotes instead of Unicode... I guess I'll have to put Twitterfeed on hold and do it manually until the other apps catch up.
Thanks for the quick response, Mario. -
I think it's down to what tool you use to write your blog posts. There may be settings etc. depending on the tool. Also, copy/paste from somewhere else often copies these more complex characters.
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Inappropriate?If you like, you can replicate this issue by selecting to view the source of your blog, then search for the title containing "go see: jessica..." (the one with the 8217 character). Copy that title string, and paste it into the twitter update window. Once you hit update it will appear in your timeline and look fine in the browser, but in twitterrific you'll see the original 8217 string.
I just did this myself and you can see the result here:
http://skitch.com/mario/kebk/twitterr...
This did not involve twitterfeed at all, just a copy/paste from the original source.1 Comment Add a comment
This solves the problem
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Yeah, the Unicode/Plain Text issue was a new one to me, but I understand now where it's coming from... Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any way for me to prevent this from happening (that i'm knowledgeable enough to do myself, that is), and having the twitters go out w/out the unicode string is more important than automating the process, so i'll probably have to drop twitterfeed and do it manually until twitteriffic is able to decode those strings...
Thank you for your help, though. I realize now that it isn't a Twitterfeed issue.
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